From Plate to Plough: With humility, on farmer income

ASHOK GULATI SHWETA SAINI | JUNE 20 2016 | INDIAN EXPRESS

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NDA’s existing agricultural policies are ill-equipped to achieve the stated goal of doubling them in five years.

As the Narendra Modi government completed two years in office, almost each arm of government issued hordes of advertisements celebrating achievements and delineating policies and programmes that were transforming India. The ministry of agriculture and farmers’ welfare came out with a big picture of PM Modi, spelling out 10 points reflecting the government’s agri-vision and strategic interventions to transform Indian agriculture. Topping this list were: “Farmers’ income to be doubled in five years”, followed by the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana, Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana, soil health cards, organic farming,…CONTINUE READING

A Wider Battle

 

DIPA SINHA | JUNE 13 2016 | INDIAN EXPRESS

Other indicators such as those related to women’s status also show a very strong correlation with malnutrition levels. Calculating simple correlation coefficients between stunting levels and different indicators it is seen that stunting is most highly correlated with the percentage of women in the state having a bank account in their name (minus 0.83) and percentage of female literacy (minus 0.68). Similarly, stunting is also highly correlated with the percentage of households in a state using improved sanitation facilities (minus 0.62)…CONTINUE READING

Maize farmer ‘beats the heat’

R. VIMAL KUMAR | JUNE 4 2016 | THE HINDU

/PICTURE FROM THE HINDU

Even as several maize farmers are upset over withered crops due to extremely hot conditions, a farmer in Tirupur district is showing how adopting progressive farming practices can ‘beat the heat,’ and reap success by cultivating maize.

S. Shanmugasundaram (65), a multi-crop farmer from Karapalayam village who always looked for innovations over the past four-decades, tried out a new hybrid, heat-resistant seed variety of maize developed at the State Seed Farm in Pongalur, and followed certain creative agronomic procedures, to get rich dividends.

His maize field, spreads little over an acre, is now filled with cobs that have seeds/grains till to the top and in sizes more than the conventionally grown corncobs.

“Usually, severe heat is not conducive for raising maize as even I have faced losses earlier. This is due to…CONTINUE READING

The MGNREGA index

Figuring out key parameters on which to measure a State’s performance provides a playbook of best practices for others to follow.

GRAPHIC FROM THE HINDU

SHOBHIT MATHUR NOMESH BOLIA | MAY 31 2016 | THE HINDU

Second, MGNREGA requires that wages be paid within 15 days of closing the muster roll. Last financial year, only 40 per cent of the wages were paid within the stipulated time of 15 days. Manipur stood out in this case with 82 per cent of wages being paid within 15 days while Meghalaya was only able to pay wages for 4 per cent of the people on time.

Third, work completion rate refers to the number of works completed compared to works started, in percentage terms. Mizoram performed best in this case with a 92 per cent work completion rate. Tripura, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh also had work completion rates of above 80 per cent. Arunachal Pradesh was at the bottom at just 20 per cent work completion rate.

Performance score

The absolute values of each performance metric are scaled to a value between 0 and 10 by dividing with the highest value across States (to get a value between 0 and 1) and multiplying it by 10. We added up…CONTINUE READING

Starving MGNREGA

 

NIKHIL DEY, ARUNA ROY | MARCH 30 2016 | INDIAN EXPRESS

The MGNREGA was inspired by the Maharashtra Employment Guarantee Act, passed in 1977, wherein policymakers found wage employment as the best way to empower people against drought…CONTINUE READING

Modi Sarkar’s big budgetary miss: Malnutrition

KUNDAN PANDEY | MARCH 4 2016 | DOWN T EARTH

Photo: Soumik Mukherjee / Picture from DOWN TO EARTH

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Narendra Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat when he claimed that malnutrition in his state was high because girls had become “beauty-conscious”. In May 2014, he became the Prime Minister of India. Five months into his stint, the National Democratic Alliance government received a survey conducted by UNICEF named the “Rapid Survey on Children”. The survey was commissioned by the Union Ministry of Women and Child Development. All this information was revealed…CONTINUE READING

The poor and the environment: lessons from energy crisis

SUNITA NARAIN

| MARCH 15 2016 | DOWN TO EARTH

We know that the poor are worst affected by environmental degradation. They live in poverty; have the highest exposure to pollution; drink contaminated water, which is responsible for the highest mortality among children; breathe polluted air; and depend on depleting forest resources for their survival. Research over the years has made it clear that the poor, through their intensive use of natural resources, are not responsible for environmental degradation. It is the extensive use of resources on a commercial scale, involving highly energy-intensive and extractive industrial methods, by the rich that is primarily responsible for degradation.

In the 1970s and ’80s it was widely said that the “other energy crisis” is firewood for cooking as supply was short and women had to spend hours walking to collect this basic need. It was also said that this use of energy by the…CONTINUE READING

Across the aisle- Dear farmers: Achhe din are coming

P.CHIDAMBARAM | MARCH 6 2016 | THE HINDU

Farmers had taken note of the BJP’s failure to keep its election promise of offering a Minimum Support Price (MSP) of cost + 50 per cent. I had pointed out that the increases in MSP in 2015-16 were paltry. Members of Parliament were aghast when Prime Minister Modi declared his contempt for MGNREGA that, according to him, was “a monument to the failure of the Congress governments”. Critics warned the…CONTINUE READING

Insure farmers to ensure future

 

DOWN TO EARTH |

SUNITA NARAIN | FEBRUARY 15 2016

I saw this situation first-hand in the Mewat district of Haryana, where farmers told me they had been suffering for the past three cropping seasons. They were broke as each time they planted crops there was some unseasonal devastation that took a crippling toll. In the summer of 2015, for instance, they had planted rice and first rains were delayed. They begged and borrowed to run expensive diesel-fuelled tube wells (electricity for agriculture is supposedly assured but it goes off when farmers need it most). Finally, paddy was ready. But then came a night of apocalyptic rain—it rained over 250 mm in five hours. This, in a district where average annual rainfall is 500-600 mm. When I visited the village, not even two hours’ drive from Delhi, fields were flooded, crops destroyed. There was deep despair in the eyes of every farmer I met.

Let’s leave for the moment the questions—very real and urgent—why these extreme weather events are happening in our world with greater frequency and intensity. Let’s discuss instead what we need to do.

First, we need to know that these events are breaking our world. Today, we read more about Snowzilla—the massive snowstorm that has hit the eastern coast of the US—than the hailstorms and freak rain events that are livelihood spoilers in our country. These events have to make news, even if…CONTINUE READING

The invisible drought

 

INDIAN EXPRESS | HARSH MANDER | FEBRUARY 8 2016

Back in the late-1980s, many states across India were reeling under back-to-back droughts for three consecutive years, not much different from the circumstances of India in 2015-16. I was district collector in districts of MP and Chhattisgarh during those years. At that time, for Central and state governments, as for the media and public opinion, there was little that was weightier than responding, or being seen to…continue reading