People's Archive of Rural India Marudupudi Nagaraju has a three-acre mango orchard in Pomula Bheemavaram village in Andhra Pradesh. A daily wage worker of the Madiga community, this land was assigned to him around 25 years ago by the state government. It was done in a move by the state to redistribute land among the landless classes introduced under the Andhra Pradesh Land Reforms (Ceiling on Agricultural Holdings) Act, 1973. hen...

KEY TRENDS   • Oxfam India's 2023 India Supplement report on poverty and inequality in India reveals that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Following the pandemic in 2019, the bottom 50 per cent of the population have continued to see their wealth chipped away. By 2020, their income share was estimated to have fallen to only 13 per cent of the national income and have less than 3...

-Hindustan Times Farm policymaking slowed down after the repeal of three laws in 2021. But the climate crisis, geopolitical instability and inflation have exacerbated the urgency for reforms In November 2021, Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi repealed three contentious farm laws in a dramatic turnaround. The entire episode — from the passage of the laws, the protests that followed and the turnaround — had stalled national agriculture policymaking. Yet, as this column...

-The Hindu The increasing cost of production and the increase in GST on cartons has triggered protests in Himachal Pradesh Apple growers in Himachal Pradesh are out on the streets some three decades after their last big agitation. The protests are not surprising; their anger has been simmering for a while. To understand the present crisis, it is crucial to understand the developments of the last few decades. In the 1970s and 1980s,...

-Foundation for Agrarian Studies In December 2020, in line with the Central Farm Laws, the Government of Karnataka passed an amendment to the Karnataka Agricultural Produce Marketing (Regulation and Development) Act, 1966. This amendment reduced the scope of the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committees (APMC) by effectively ending their status as the only place (with some exceptions) where wholesale agricultural trade was permitted by law. Despite the three Central Farm Laws being...