Electric Vehicle

  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...