-The Indian Express The crisis in the crop’s prices in two of the four years of the Modi government illustrate that farmers no longer matter to it. Farmers are habitually great raconteurs. My grandfather would often narrate an episode, when he encountered a farmer sitting by a heap of potatoes in the middle of the night. On investigating what compelled the farmer to guard potatoes when there were no buyers, he was...

- The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy Aadhaar's principal goals were to end fraud and reach welfare to the poorest. But in practice it has achieved neither. The claimed elimination of bogus cards has been found to be exaggerated. On the other hand, the insistence on the Aadhaar card has led to the brutal exclusion from welfare of the very poor and the homeless — for reasons such as...

-FoodFirst.org Over the past seven years, institutions (such as the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization) have increasingly turned to the rubric of 'climate-smart agriculture' to tout the objectives of increased productivity, greater resilience, and a reduction in emissions. Though climate-smart agriculture's objectives are laudable, the latest Policy Brief of FoodFirst entitled 'What's Smart About Climate-smart Agriculture?' by Marcus Taylor explores how the framework has been used, at times,...

-Business Standard In the country, wheat, the main rabi foodgrain, has been sown on 29.55 million hectares, almost 1.44 mn ha less than last year Drought in parts of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, and a shift in area towards more lucrative gram, has pulled down wheat and mustard acreage in the current rabi season. This, with low farm-gate prices for a second year, has aggravated distress in rural areas. Water levels in...

-Livemint.com The committee’s suggestions on major reforms include an overhaul of the Union agriculture ministry New Delhi: In a detailed action plan for doubling farmers’ incomes, a top government panel has proposed major reforms to the existing administrative structure. This includes an overhaul of the Union agriculture ministry, setting up a three-tier planning and review mechanism through district, state and national level committees and an annual ease of doing agribusiness survey. The committee on...