-The Times of India Punjab, the leader of green revolution during the '70s, has become disreputable for farmers' suicides in last two decade or so. Usually, these suicides are attributed to farmers' indebtedness to banks and commission agents. However, it is to be noted that bank credit has played a pivotal role in investment into tubewells, tractors, farm mechanization, horticulture, dairy, poultry and forestry all over India, and especially in Punjab and...

-The Hindu Business Line New Delhi: A substantial increase in input costs of materials has led to a decline in crop income over the years. This has resulted in the purchasing power of farmers not improving even though there was an increase in farm output, an official report has said. “By and large, the per hectare real value of output increased for most crops during the period 2004-05 to 2013-14, but the...

-The Financial Express More than ‘normal’ rainfall in the last three weeks in 11 districts of south-interior Karnataka, which received scanty rains in the first two months of monsoon season (June-July), has helped revive kharif sowing activities to a large extent. According to the Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre (KSNDMC), the quantum of rainfall in August so far in these districts, including Mandya, Mysuru, Chitradurga and Bengaluru, has been 95...

-The Hindu Fifty years since the Green Revolution, the architect of the reform highlights the crisis facing Indian agriculture today It is 11 years since agronomist M.S. Swaminathan handed over his recommendations for improving the state of agriculture in India to the former United Progressive Alliance government, at the height of the Vidarbha farmer suicides crisis, but they are still to be implemented. To address the agrarian crisis and farmers’ unrest across...

-The Indian Express Plunged from 8.61 L hectares in 2014 to 4.5 L hectares this year Jalandhar: THE POOR rate of Basmati (fine quality aromatic rice) which Punjab farmers have been getting for the past few years has resulted in reduced acreage and, in the past four years, the area of cultivation has decreased to nearly half under the crop. Scientists say that due to decrease in Basmati cultivation, the area under...