-Business Standard Decision likely soon, states will be free to adopt one or more of the models suggested New Delhi: The Central government is looking at spending a minimum of Rs 200-250 billion initially along with the states in ensuring that farmers get the benefit of Minimum Support Price (MSP) either through direct procurement of goods or a system of Price Deficiency Payment on the lines of Madhya Pradesh’s Bhawaantar Bhugtan Model. Officials...

-TheWire.in Unless consumer preferences shift to climate resistant crops, goals associated with the policy won’t materialize. On March 14, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) uploaded a draft of the National Forest Policy 2018, three decades years after the last such policy. The draft appears to be an attempt to shift the approach towards forestry in India – specifically, from a local community- and ecology-centric approach emphasised in the...

-The Hindu Business Line Centre on a mission mode to promote these nutri-cereals New Delhi: The Centre is drawing up an ambitious plan to increase millet production in the country to 45 million tonnes (mt) by 2030 from the current levels of 17 mt, a senior Agriculture Ministry official said on Thursday. “The government would like to promote millets from this year onwards. This year has been declared as year of millets. Over...

-The Hindu Farming must be treated as a market-based enterprise and made viable on its own terms The week-long farmers’ march which reached Mumbai earlier this month, on the anniversary of Gandhi’s Dandi March of 1930, was unprecedented in many ways. It was mostly silent and disciplined, mostly leaderless, non-disruptive and non-violent, and well organised. It received the sympathy of middle class city dwellers, food and water from bystanders, free medical services...

-Livemint.com The only way to solve the farmers’ problem is to make entry to other sectors attractive by creating employment opportunities, and to make it easy to exit farming Farmers have a bad romance with the Indian polity. On the one hand, India loves, even worships, these farmers. On the other, Indian policymakers create the most impossible regulatory environment for the agricultural sector, trapping farmers in a low-income, low-productivity occupation. The latest...