The National Agro Foundation is on a mission to improve yield and income, especially for small farmers. Anyone planning to improve the lot of farmers in the country would do well to begin with these wise words: “Fallowness is in one's mind and not in the soil.” This was constantly uttered by C. Subramaniam, the architect of India's agricultural policies that led to the Green Revolution. While his policies and high-yielding varieties...

Massive grain procurement to meet the requirements under the proposed national food security law could drive out the private sector and have larger implications on the state of the domestic procurement market, a study on food and nutritional security has warned. Apart from impacting exports and cereal price in the open market, rising public procurement will only make it costly to buy, store, transport and distribute grain, the study said, adding...

We hear that endosulfan is banned globally and it is against Indian interests and that the European Union and the corporates are behind it. India is a big country and we do not know what happens in one area of the country or how New Delhi is responding to that. So let me try to walk you on this issue. I went to Kasargod as team member of Thanal, a...

Cash transfer as substitute for state service provision is a dangerous recipe for callously anti-poor and corrupt governance. THE staggering number of recent articles, papers and books on the virtues of giving cash in place of public services to the poor has created an impression that a sort of epidemic has broken out. Economists, policymakers, bureaucrats and newspaper commentators are all infected by it and are in turn infecting others. The central...

The government on Thursday admitted to problems in storage as well as supply of sub-standard foodgrains to the poor after senior Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Brinda Karat expressed serious concern in the Rajya Sabha over grain rotting. “I do admit,” Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said after Ms. Karat charged the government with supplying rotten foodgrains to remote tribal areas. She showed samples of spoiled wheat and rice in the...