The three new farm acts legislated by the Government of India have been widely acclaimed at home and abroad as historical and long overdue. However, some experts, states, and stakeholders, including farmers, have been protesting against them and seeking their withdrawal.
Agriculture and allied sectors provide employment to close to half of the workforce of the country and contribute about 17 per cent of national income. Among the ten major sectors of Indian economy the contribution of agriculture is highest both in employment as well as in value added output.
Traditionally, agriculture is the prime sector of rural economy and rural employment. The transition in composition of output and occupation from agriculture to more productive non-farm sectors is considered as an important source of economic growth and transformation in rural and total economy.
Western disturbances have a long history of climatological, synoptic and satellite observations based studies. In present study an attempt has been made to understand the different aspects of western disturbances like movement, associated convection, induce systems and associated weather. The western disturbances (WDs) during post monsoon and winter season have been selected for the study as they are mainly responsible for precipitation over western Himalayan region and adjoining plains of northwest India.
Agricultural marketing in India suffers from inefficiency, a disconnect between the prices received by producers and the prices paid by consumers, fragmented marketing channels, poor infrastructure and policy distortions. Urgent reforms are needed to address these inadequacies and check the excesses of middlemen. While encouraging new models that improve the bargaining power of producers and scaling up successful experiments, producers' companies and cooperative marketing societies could be promoted to provide alternative avenues for sale of produce.
The agriculture sector has gone through different phases of growth, embracing a wide variety of institutional interventions, and technology and policy regimes. From the late 1960s onwards, the green revolution helped the sector maintain steady growth for more than two decades. But the challenges that swept through the economy in the 1990s after the initiation of economic reforms arrested this growth. Conscious efforts have brought about a recovery of growth since the middle of the first decade of the 2000s.
This policy paper addresses the rapidly evolving energy sector of India and the growth of first-generation biofuels as an alternative to fossil-based transportation fuels.
The main reason for the continued low use of quality seed has been inadequate access. Though the private sector has taken a lead in harnessing technological innovation in some segments, it has concentrated on particular types of seed. It has also occasionally supplied spurious and low quality seeds and charged exorbitant prices. There is, thus, a strong need to promote competition, strengthen the role of the public sector and encourage investment in seed production.
During the 1960s and 1970s there was an intense debate on the observed inverse relationship between farm size and per hectare agricultural productivity in India. It was subsequently argued that the higher productivity of smallholdings would disappear with the adoption of superior technology, modernisation and growth in general. However, close to half a century later, National Sample Survey data from the initial years of the 21st century show that smallholdings in Indian agriculture still exhibit a higher productivity than large holdings.
