-The Hindu After the extensive crop damage caused by the whitefly pest attack last year, cotton farmers in Haryana and Punjab have brought down the area under cotton this season. They are likely to shift to paddy and pulses. In Haryana, farmers have planted cotton on 4.76 lakh hectares so far, against nearly 5 lakh hectares during the same period last year. In Punjab, the area under cotton is 2.57 lakh hectares,...

-Business Standard The first two years of the Narendra Modi government were marked by big announcements that will take their time to materialise. The one sector that is unfazed by slogans is agriculture. The sector is crippled by back-to-back droughts coupled with a record fall in farm prices. A slump in global markets meant that agriculture exports, which could provide farmers alternative revenue, dried up. Agriculture and processed food exports from India...

-The Indian Express NDA government’s plans for agriculture are still to bear fruit As the Modi government celebrates two years in office, any review of its functioning will be incomplete without examining its record on the farm front. In the two years (FY15 and FY16), while the economy grew at 7.2 per cent and 7.6 per cent respectively, agriculture and the allied sector grew at -0.2 per cent and 1.1 per cent....

-Hindustan Times With progressively increasing severity of rising temperatures and rain deficits over two consecutive years – 2014 and 2015, the Great Indian Drought was always coming. The India Meteorological Department, ministry of home affairs, the ministry of water resources, the Ministry of agriculture and farmers welfare office, and the National Disaster Management Authority knew it. The question is, what did we do with this knowledge? Six hundred million of India’s 1.2 billion...

-Economic and Political Weekly In an effort to understand the trends of farmer suicides, this article uses data from the National Crime Records Bureau to estimate the suicide mortality rate of farmers and non-farmers for India and its states. The methodology used corrects for an error present in previous studies and alters some commonly held views about the level and trend of farmer suicides in India. Please click here to access. ...