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  While agriculture’s share in India’s economy has progressively declined, even today agriculture, directly and indirectly, occupies over 50 percent of India’s workforce and contributes to around 17 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP). With a growing population and rising incomes in the cities, there is more and more burden to produce more and better, in terms of quantity and quality. However, agri stakeholders primarily farmers still face many challenges — government apathy, uneven climate, no easy access to credit, exploitative market practices and a fragmented supply chain to name a few key issues. As with many other sectors today, leveraging technology helps alleviate a lot of these above-mentioned challenges. Being a more traditional space, the use and adoption of tech in the agri space has been far behind the curve as compared to other sectors. The recent explosion in the use of smartphones in the rural areas has helped in agri taking its first concrete steps towards ...

  Indian agriculture is being plagued by various problems. These problems directly and indirectly affect the life of a farmer. Farming practices and other activities of agriculture consume time as well as the efforts of a farmer. We stock grains and use food throughout the year. However, we hardly give a thought to the hard-work and dedication of farmers involved in the production of the crops. These food crops are cultivated to contribute to the overall growth in the sector of agriculture. Nevertheless, the  problems faced by farmers  go unnoticed in the entire process of extracting food and harvesting crops. Why Are Indian Farmers Facing Problems? Since the 1960s, industrialised agriculture came into the picture. This has been successful but it is leading to a decrease in the variety of crops and livestock produced. Farmers have to face the issue of lesser rainfall due to improper irrigation. In a country like India, they have to struggle hard to achieve sustained ...

  India has enough food; does it have too many people working in agriculture? The pressure on land is an outcome of policy, which condemns most people to marginal farming. India needs a different set of solutions for agriculture and for those working the land. India is an agricultural country. Agriculture is “only”  ~16 % of GDP  but the largest sector for employment. Officially farmers are only a few hundred million, but adding family members who help or occasionally farm, as also wage labourers, the number of farm workers is likely to be closer to half a billion people. But how many people would India need farming if it were as labour efficient as the US for growing crops? I am not suggesting it is possible, or even desirable (large, mechanised farms with massive chemical and water inputs) but as a thought exercise? Just four million people.  The US is extreme; with less than 2% of its population  growing food sufficient for almost 2 billion people ,...

 THE ongoing debate over the farm laws is a huge opportunity for Indian polity to find out whether it is the complexity of farming problems or its own crookedness which is responsible for the sorry state of our small and marginal farmers and farm workers. Despite the stellar performance amid the pandemic, the Indian agricultural sector continues to be crisis-ridden. On an average, over 15,300 farmers and farm workers annually committed suicide from 1995 to 2015; and the trend is still going on unabated. As a director in the erstwhile Planning Commission, I witnessed a major move by the National Development Council under the leadership of the then PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee to reverse the suicidal downtrend in agriculture. Subsequently, with the arrival of the Manmohan Singh government, the tempo of agricultural development accelerated. The MS Swaminathan Commission was set up with the mandate of delving into the agrarian crisis and recommending policies to resolve it. Though it was th...

The government on Tuesday asked the agro-chemicals industry to come out with new molecules of global standards for the farmers' benefit, while industry body CropLife India pitched for stable policy and regulatory regime to boost the growth of the sector. Addressing a digital conference, Minister of State for Agriculture Parshottam Rupala said: "The crop protection industry should share propositions to make crop protection products which are newer, safer and more effective, for the benefit of the farmers". Indian agro-chemicals industry is a champion sector and is all set and open to align with best international practices and regulatory reforms, a statement issued by the industry body quoted the minister as saying. Rupala said the government is also looking at a cluster approach for imparting quality education and extension services for the  farmers  and asked the industry to support this initiative. Speaking on the occasion, National Rainfed Area Authority CEO Ashok Dalw...

 In this country, in the last 70 years  many achievements are there we have  built businesses, we have built industry,  our scientists are going to Mars but of  all these things the most significant  achievement for us is that our poor farmer,  without any infrastructure, hardly  any technology just with traditional  knowledge, he's been feeding over a  billion people. This is not a small thing  but we are taking that away from him.  Today go out and ask anybody, any farmer that how many of them want their children to go into farming, it is less than 15%. In another 20- 25 years you will see you will not know how to grow food. In this country, in the last 12 years 3 lakh farmers have committed suicide even in a war that many people don't die. This is happening essentially because of the investment that goes into irrigation projects and inability to access market. It's very important that farming is made into an attractive proce...

  Farmers fear they will no longer get paid at MSP, they want profitable sales in the form of minimum support prices (MSPs) to be a legal right. The farmers demand a separate ordinance to provide a clear provision that if any agency buys the crop of the farmer below the MSP, then legal action will be taken against it Commission agents are concerne kid that they will lose their commissions in mandis and influential agents do not want to lose grip over the farmers. According to a Punjab Agricultural University study, there are over 12 lakh farming families in Punjab and 28,000 registered commission agents. A large part of the state’s economy rests on funds infused by central procurement agencies such as the Food Corporation of India (FCI). Now, protesters fear the FCI will no longer be able to procure from the state mandis, which will rob the middleman/commission agent/arhatiya of his 2.5 per cent commission. The state itself will lose the 6 per cent commission it used to charge on t...

  Just 100 km south-west of Bengaluru is  Sakkare Nadu  (land of sugar) – Mandya. With five rivers – Cauvery, Hemavathy, Lokapavani, Veera Vaishnavi and Shimsha – flowing through it, Mandya is known for progressive agriculture. Two large dams – Krishna Raja Sagara and Hemavathy – irrigate over a lakh hectares in the district. Lush green fields of paddy, sugarcane, mulberry and vegetables around the buzzing town of Mandya display a prosperous image. Mandya’s agriculture attracts media attention for three reasons – its dispute with the neighbouring states on sharing Cauvery water, farmers’ agitation for release of payment against cane procured by factories, and farmer suicides. This year’s pandemic and lockdown posed a new crisis for the illustrious farmers of Mandya. Lockdown restrictions on transport during March and April forced them to sell their vegetables in Mandya market itself, for half the price they fetched last year. Since the month of May, transport restrictions...

  It will have really serious consequences. govt will always tell thier benefits that's how it do things. When they did demonetization they said there will be curb in black money, corruption and bank interest rate will be down and there will be no maoist activity but sir it failed because u were not told the other side. I am son of farmer i can tell u the side effects of this amendment 1. Govt removed the intra state trade barriers but what u think in a country where the average land holding of 86% percent farmer is less than 2 hectare can the farmer from Assam sell his produce in Kerala it is impractical due ro transportation costs its second flaw will be the state govt will not give enough attention to its farmer such as Bihar govt can let thier farmers let on the prices being given in haryana , farmers will be caught in vicious trap where they will be left helpless. 2. Storage facilities , yeahh it is right that india is now self sufficient in food but can u tell me then why we ...

In recent times, agriculture made headlines for all the wrong reasons: Farmers quitting cultivation; the sector turning into a perennial loss-making enterprise; and the country’s official policy to downsize the dependence on agriculture to reduce overall economic hardship     among the poorest of the population. Agriculture’s fast-declining economic importance reached such an extent that economists suggested India had already turned into a non-agrarian economy and the more people quit farming, the better the fortune of remaining farmers would be. But two developments in the first half of September seem to be forcing us to revise these perceptions of Indian farming and farmers. First, when India recorded 23.9 per cent contraction in the gross domestic product (GDP) in the first quarter (April-June, 2020), agriculture emerged as  the unbelievable winner, growing at 3.4 per cent . This growth in the agriculture sector was based on the rabi or winter ...

 "Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan." We all know that this a very popular slogan. You must have heard it multiple times but how much do we actually value our farmers and our soldiers? You can guess this by the fact that very few of you would already be aware of what I'm going to write about today. I'm sure that most of you would have no idea about the topic. But it isn't your fault- our media deliberately hides such issues under the carpet. Recently, the government has come up with 3 ordinances related to agriculture which has infuriated the farmers of the nation. Especially the farmers of Punjab and Haryana are out on the streets to protest against these ordinances.  WHY are they protesting ? WHAT changes are suggested by these ordinances and WHY does it concern all of us(the common man)? In this blog, come let us find out about all of this. Firstly let us know about the Indian Agriculture System and for this we will have to go back in history for a bit- When the country got...