Tribal communities in Similipal are being encouraged to conserve seeds and water, use bio-inputs and inter-crop millets with other crops. Farmers are optimistic that this can bring them food security and better livelihoods.
India needs to grow a lot more food, and do it sustainably to be able to meet its future food security and also keep its climate commitments. Precision farming is still nascent in the country, but could offer a way forward.
Buffeted by low prices, middlemen and uncertain rains, and lacking adequate state support, orange growers in Assam fear they will not be able to continue living off their lands much longer.
Do reader preferences influence how the media selects what to report on? A study of media coverage of land conflicts, the Covid-19 crisis and the Farm Bills provides some answers.
The emphasis on rice and wheat production for decades has steadily reduced the importance of millets. once a staple for many Indians, especially adivasis. Some states, like Odisha, are trying to change this.
By simultaneously carrying out multiple development schemes in a village, can its all-round development be made sustainable? Uttam Gram, in Haryana's Donkhera village, provides answers.
Paddy farmers in Baksa sell their produce at low prices, finding the Minimum Support Price unreliable. The income from agriculture is inadequate, forcing them to look for daily wage work.
Assam's tea growers, struggling under high production costs and low profit margins, have turned to growing agarwood, in the process helping to revive it from its endangered status.
Most rural women work on farms, but only one in six owns the land she works on. Reforms to succession laws have helped bring parity for women in family property rights, but not for agricultural lands.
Amidst the gloom of lives endlessly disrupted by river erosion, a few farmers are successfully experimenting with horticulture in the heart of the very river that is swallowing their lands.
The Brahmaputra has eroded lands along its course repeatedly, forcing villagers along its embankments to find new homes and work each time, in a perpetual struggle to stabilise their lives and livelihoods.
Repeated natural disasters, closed mandis and a forced halt to transportation of produce have brought maize farmes in Nabarangpur and other districts to the brink of distress.
As Covid-19 rages through the rural areas, hundreds of thousands of tribal farmers in Odisha's Kandhamal district are selling their turmeric harvest at half the usual market rate.
Despite their significant contribution to agriculture in India, women are not given their due recognition as farmers. There are some key steps that can be taken to correct this.
The second attempt of the NDA government to create a market for farmers' produce may not fare much better than the first one, for the same reason - it fails to address the asymmetry of power between the farmers and buyers.
It is only by looking back at its own history of audit findings that the constitutional auditor can draw attention to policy decisions that were flawed at the very beginning.
The first of a three part series on the crisis facing farmers today by Kannan Kasturi.
Telangana’s free registration of plain paper land sale initiative to digitally clean up its land records not only benefits its dispossessed farmers but makes land governance transparent, reports Manipadma Jena.
The uneven performance of MGNREGA in the task of rural asset generation requires a careful comparison of the decision making processes involved in those cases where the works undertaken have produced value and where it has failed to, writes Pavan Kulkarni.
Per Biological Diversity Act, 2002 before using any Indian biological material for commercial or R&D purposes, public consultation is needed via the local Biodiversity Management Committees, which the National Biodiversity Authority wants to do away with.
Last month, the Bombay High Court passed an order to shift IPL matches scheduled for the month of May out of the state of Maharashtra citing an acute water shortage in some parts of the state for its decision. PRS Legislative Research, answers some basic questions about ground water and its depletion in our country.
Even as many pockets of the state, including its capital, battle the ravages of development and consumerism, a couple of villages visited by the author stand as examples of resilient local economies and lifestyles. Aditya Vikram Rametra describes what he saw here.
Can we look at ending poverty without looking at the structural reasons and dimensions of poverty and inequality? Pradeep Baisakh looks at this and at other objectives within the UN SDG framework and analyses how realistic their achievement would be.
India Together is published with support from Oorvani Foundation.
