-The Hindu Three out of five farmers in India grow their crops using rainwater, instead of irrigation. However, per hectare government investment into their lands may be 20 times lower, government procurement of their crops is a fraction of major irrigated land crops, and many of the government’s flagship agriculture schemes are not tailored to benefit them. A new rainfed agriculture atlas released this week not only maps the agro biodiversity and...

-The Hindu The farming work is being taken up by the Kudumbashree’s Pulimath community development society under the Mahila Kisan Sashaktikaran Pariyojana Thiruvananthapuram: A 13.5-acre ‘padasekharam’ in Plavodu ward of Pulimath grama panchayat that remained fallow for years is being transformed into a paddy field as part of the Kudumbashree District Mission’s fallow less-village activities. Taken up by the Kudumbashree’s Pulimath community development society under the Mahila Kisan Sashaktikaran Pariyojana, the organic paddy...

-The Indian Express Development professionals and policymakers have tried many a scheme to address these issues. One idea that has found resonance in recent times is Farmer Producer Organisations or FPOs. It is well-known that Indian farming is predominantly subsistence-oriented. Over 86% of our farmers operate individual holdings below two hectares, while cultivating 47% of the country’s total cultivated area. The production and productivity of these farms are generally low, and...

-The Indian Express To address farmers' woes, we need a multi-pronged strategy of income support, government investment, and institutional innovations, and not a one-size-fits-all approach. The two main policy interventions repeatedly discussed in recent months to tackle farmer distress — loan waivers and minimum support prices (MSP) — treat all farmers (large/small, male/female) alike. But farmers are heterogeneous. They differ especially by income, land owned and gender. And farmer dissatisfaction is...

  In its 2014 election manifesto, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), among other things, promised to "take steps to enhance the profitability in agriculture, by ensuring a minimum of 50% profits over the cost of production". In his 2018-19 Union budget speech too, the Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley informed the Parliament that the 2014 election manifesto of the BJP had stated that the farmers should get at least 1.5 times the...