-Down to Earth17 clusters have been chosen in 8 states to roll out the pilot of Operation Green, a Central scheme aimed to contain annual price distress of tomatoes, onion and potatoes Nine months after announcing ?Operation Green? to provide the rightful price to farmer producers, the Union government has prepared guidelines to implement the operation. The scheme was devised to contain the annual price distress of tomatoes, onion and...

-Livemint.com With shrinking farm sizes and lack of accurate land records, farmers find it difficult to generate enough income to provide for their households From farm subsidies to farm loan waivers, the Indian government spends crores on farmer welfare, but these efforts will be inadequate unless they can tackle an increasingly daunting barrier: lack of land. The provisional figures from the latest agriculture census reveals how land—the most critical input for agriculture—is...

-Livemint.com Loan waivers and electricity subsidies are band-aids at best; a deeper transformation is needed The past few days have neatly summed up the scale and nature of the challenges facing India’s agriculture sector. First, the provisional agriculture census 2015-16 showed that landholdings have continued their decades-long trend of fragmentation, leading to a further rise in the proportion of small and marginal farmers. Then, 30,000 farmers, who had started their march from...

-Firstpost.com The recent increases in minimum support prices have attracted two criticisms from two opposite sides. One is that this is less than what farmers deserve, the second is that this is populist and ignores larger macro side effects. The increase in fair remunerative price for sugarcane has also been criticised for not adequately addressing the woes of the sugar sector. Ramesh Chand, member, agriculture, NITI Aayog talks to Firstpost on...

-The Hindu Many BJP MPs make it to the list of top 10 performers based on attendance, questions asked, and debates participated. The monsoon session of Parliament is set to begin on July 18 and it marks the beginning of the fifth year of the 16th Lok Sabha. With barely a year to go for the general election, here is an analysis, based on the data available in the Lok Sabha and...