-Livemint.com Increasing women’s ownership of land in rural areas can help cut poverty and boost agricultural output in a country like India where dependence on agriculture is high New Delhi: Increasing women’s ownership of land in rural areas can help cut poverty and boost agricultural output in a country like India where dependence on agriculture is high. Women constitute 30.3% of the total number of cultivators and 42.6% of the agricultural labourers...

-Livemint.com Overall foodgrain output, however, rose marginally to 252.22 mt in FY16, farm ministry’s advance estimates show New Delhi: The crippling drought over the past year failed to impact India’s overall foodgrain production but led to the lowest production of pulses in six years, showed the fourth advance estimates released by the agriculture ministry on Tuesday. In fact, according to the ministry, foodgrain production rose marginally—from 252.02 million tonnes (mt) in 2014-15 to 252.22...

-IndiaSpend.com As floods ravage eastern and northern India, agriculture in 115 districts across 15 states is “highly vulnerable” to climate change, according to a May 2016 study, published in Indian Academy of Science’s journal Current Science. The first to analyse 38 meteorological, agricultural and social data across all of India’s 572 rural districts, the study creates a climate vulnerability index for agriculture, divided into five categories of vulnerability: Very high, high, moderate,...

-The Hindu 48 % of all farmers’ suicides were of those below 35 while it was 57 % for agricultural labourers, says study. A recent study by the Indian Council for Social Science Research of the growing number of farmers’ suicides in Punjab has revealed that the agrarian crisis is hitting farmers and labourers below the age of 35 the hardest. “Nearly 48.6 per cent of farmers who have committed suicide in Punjab...

-The Hindu Business Line The Government has several short and long-term strategies to achieve self-sufficiency Who can deny that pulses are at the core of the average Indian diet? Therefore, the NDA government’s multi-pronged short-term and long-term strategies to meet the growing consumption of pulses in the country — from importing to increasing production through new technologies, and making cultivation attractive to farmers — is to be welcomed. In fact, pulses play...