-The Telegraph This year, a combination of factors is hurting the agriculture sector immensely A quiet, reverse transformation is happening in the countryside, and it is disconcerting. This sowing season, growing numbers of farmers are falling back on their bullocks as fuel prices are piercing the roof. The tractor, the symbol of modern farming, is becoming a luxury in the literal sense. The conventional ploughing equipment tied to bullocks costs only a...
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The Covid-19 Pandemic and Agriculture in Rural India: Observations from Indian Villages -Tapas Singh Modak and Soham Bhattacharya
-Review of Agrarian Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1, January-June, 2021 This note analyses the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the production and cost of cultivation of crops grown in the monsoon (kharif) season. The note is based on a survey of 164 informants from 26 villages across 13 States of India. The survey, conducted by the Foundation for Agrarian Studies (FAS) between mid-September and mid-October, 2020, was based on telephone...
More »What India’s farm crisis really needs -Christophe Jaffrelot and Hemal Thakker
-The Indian Express To solve India’s deep agrarian crisis, more public investment and government support are needed, not the new farm laws The farmers’ movement invites us to revisit the trajectory of India’s agriculture so as to understand its real problems. Beginning in the mid-1960s, India and, especially, Punjab experienced a massive productivity boom as a result of widespread adoption of Green Revolution technologies. This transition was driven by public investment in...
More »India’s farm crisis is of the Middle Peasant, not the chhota kisan -Harish Damodaran
-The Indian Express It is the rural middle class — which experienced a roughly four-decade spell of prosperity from the 1970s and now has its back to the wall — that’s at the forefront of the agitation against the farm reform laws. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has defended his government’s agricultural reform laws by invoking Chaudhary Charan Singh and pointing to the “dayaniya sthiti (sorry plight)” of marginal farmers. These below-one-hectare cultivators...
More »Farm Laws: How Bihar’s Peasantry was Pushed to the Brink after APMCs were Scrapped -Tarique Anwar
-Newsclick.in Eradication of the APMC-regulated mandi system and the entry of private players led the farming community to losing a favourable marketplace. Farmers were left with no option but to sell their produce to private procurers at throwaway prices. New Delhi: The nationwide protests against the three contentious Farm Laws enacted by the Centre has brought Bihar into focus. It is a state where new regulations for agricultural produce and its storage,...
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