“Huge subsidy on chemical fertilisers unmindful, useless” Small and marginal farmers have raised the demand for special allocation for organic farming and ecological fertilisation in the forthcoming budget, which finance minister Pranab Mukherjee will present on March 16. According to them, chemical fertilisers, the subsidy for which is likely to touch Rs 1 lakh crore in 2011-12, are not benefitting the soil and are burdening them with high-cost cultivation instead. “The government...
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Seed companies reap rich harvest on Bt cotton wave by Sanjeeb Mukherjee
Bt cotton has doubled the seed industry and boosted the fortunes of seed firms. But yields still need to improve In the last 10 years, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) cotton and its impact on farmers has perhaps been the most talked about topic in Indian agriculture since the ‘Green Revolution’ of the 1960s and 1970s. Not only has farmers’ income from growing Bt cotton risen by almost 67 per cent in the...
More »Dr Abhijit Sen, Member-Planning Commission of India, interviewed by Ajay Vir Jakhar and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta
Dr Abhijit Sen is Member, Planning Commission of India. He is a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Cambridge (currently on leave as Professor of Economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University) and has also taught at the Universities of Sussex, Oxford and Cambridge. Besides serving various think tanks in the states and at the centre, Dr Sen has been a consultant with UNDP, ILO, FAO and various other multilateral...
More »Sustaining farm growth is possible; Investment, price assurance to yield results by Ramesh Chand
India has been striving to achieve 4% growth rate in farm output since the beginning of Ninth Five-Year Plan. However, actual growth rate has remained invariably lower than the targeted growth rate. Further, agriculture witnessed a sharp slowdown during mid-1990s to the middle of the first decade of 21st century. Annual growth rate in farm GDP declined to 2.4% a year during 1995-96 to 2004-05 from more than 3% in the...
More »Desi GM seed buried after season of scandal by Jaideep Hardikar
In the summer of 2009, farmer Ramesh Dhumale was excited when he got to plant about a kilo of seeds of what was pitched as the country’s first indigenously developed genetically modified (GM) cotton. At Rs 200 a kg, the seeds were far cheaper than the Rs 1,500-2,000 that the other GM cotton seeds cost. But the biggest plus was that the farmers could use and reuse the seeds from successive...
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