-Down to Earth As corruption hijacks procurement centres in Bundelkhand, farmers prefer suicide to a debt trap. Richard Mahapatra reports from Uttar Pradesh with photographer Sayantoni Palchoudhuri A fatal paradox strikes Bundelkhand in the face—an overflowing wheat stock yet an overwhelming number of farmer suicides. Farmers here dread the government wheat procurement centre and the post-mortem house. In Orai, a small town in the Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh, the two are...

Punjab’s agricultural sector grew at 1.6 per cent during the 11th Plan against the national average of 3.41 per cent. The growth is tardy owing to near saturation in productivity. The rural debts in Punjab are estimated to be Rs 35,000 crore. The number of indebted rural households in Punjab is 66 per cent, third highest in the country after Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. The Government of India’s debt...

-Live Mint Realized prices for the farm sector continue to soften even though the government has raised the minimum support prices by over 20% Like every year the government has hiked minimum support prices to help the farmers realize good returns in early June, but India’s rural growth story is expected to run out of steam because of falling realizations of farmers and limited policy support, according to a recent report by...

Bengal is staring at the possibility of losing self-sufficiency in rice unless the state manages to reverse a declining trend and step up production by as much as 12 per cent over the next four years. Lack of self-sufficiency in grain production need not necessarily be an alarming factor for a modern economy. But such a status is looming over Bengal in spite of factories not mushrooming on farmland — the...

-The Telegraph Costlier food items carried inflation up to 7.55 per cent in May, and the price situation could get aggravated further by the government’s decision to raise the minimum support price of paddy, oil seeds and pulses. However, the Cabinet Committee of Economic Affairs (CCEA) deferred a decision to raise urea prices because of opposition by some ministries. Inflation in May last year stood at 9.56 per cent. Overall food inflation rose to...