-Outlook India This year, the first locust attack happened on May 11 in Sri Ganganagar and Hanumangarh districts of Rajasthan. So far, 90,000 hectares in 20 districts have been affected due to the locust attack. Ever since the first locust attack happened in Barmer in May last year, Sher Singh Thakur is having sleepless nights. His village Tambor is only two kilometres from the India-Pakistan border. The fear of locusts attacking his...
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Explained: How Changes in Agri-Produce Trade Laws Will Turn Hunger into Profit-Making Business -Subodh Varma
-Newsclick.in And yet, it is being tom-tommed as ‘freedom’ for farmers and ‘self-reliance’ for country! Silently, and in double quick time, changes in laws related to cultivation, sale, stocking and pricing of agriculTural produce – food grain, vegetables, etc. – have been proposed and disposed by the Narendra Modi government. Three ordinances relating to these key dimensions were given Presidential assent late on June 5 night, and they came into force “at...
More »The RTI regime failed India during Covid-19 -Yashovardhan Azad
-Hindustan Times Responses have been elusive on critical issues, including health care infra, PM Cares fund, schemes, and migrants In the lethal jaws of a pandemic, when lives and livelihoods are at stake, the information law of a democracy is expected to live up to its responsibilities — to empower the citizens and to ensure transparency and accountability. Free flow of information is an essential component of crisis management. And this is...
More »Cash crops, Covid and the cost of unsold cotton -Jaideep Hardikar
-RuralIndiaOnline.org Huge quantities of cash crops lie unsold across India – like cotton in Maharashtra. A hunger crisis looms, yet farmers in Vidarbha plan to sow cotton, not food crops, once again this kharif season Seventy-year-old Kisan Sakhru Pawar, patriarch of a joint farming family in Maharashtra’s Yavatmal district, is very anxious. The climbing Covid-19 graph is not the main reason for his anxiety. His concern: unsold cotton. “We have 350 quintals of cotton,...
More »Meant to eradicate locusts, pesticides affect soil, crops -Jayashree Nandi
-Hindustan Times The Locust Warning Organisation (LWO) sprayed Malathion 96 and Chlorpyrifos, both organophosphate pesticides, to control the locust swarms across states. The Food and AgriculTure Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations said on Friday that it may declare the locust invasion a plague if it takes a Turn for the worse after breeding by the voracious, crop-crunching insects in India, Pakistan and West Africa. FAO now categorises the locust invasion that has...
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