Punjab Update

To motivate the farming community to restrain from burning crop residue, the Punjab Government has decided to provide subsidy worth Rs. 300 crore ranging from 50% to 80% to farmers for the purchase of 23,500 agro-machines/farm equipments for the management of paddy residue during Kharif, 2020.

Disclosing this here today, Additional Chief Secretary (Development) Anirudh Tiwari said that state government has invited applications from farmers both individually and in groups to provide subsidy on the purchase of paddy residue management machines in the current Kharif season.

Indian Express

To say agriculture is roaring may be an exaggeration, but it is definitely one sector where things are closest to business-as-usual in today’s Covid-ravaged Indian economy.

One indicator of that is sowings. Farmers have in the current kharif (monsoon) season so far planted 13.9% more area compared to last year’s coverage at this time. Moreover, acreages are higher in all major crops, barring jute.

Tribune India

PM Narendra Modi’s call for making India atmanirbhar (self-reliant) has led to a debate on the potential of the agriculture sector to become self-sufficient. Experts say we are self-reliant in cereals, wheat and paddy, but are heavily dependent on imports for oilseeds and pulses, to name a few.

Rediff

The often-repeated theory of demand generation in the rural economy due to the government’s intervention may be overstated, feel economists, even though they cite different reasons for their thesis.

A recent note brought out by Credit Suisse says that net gain from the government support measures may be just Rs 7,500 crore a month, which constitutes 0.9 per cent of the rural gross domestic product (GDP).

Telangana Today

Thanks to a good monsoon and abundant rainfall, the prices of vegetables which remained high for last several weeks in the city have started to come down.

On Sunday, the prices on essential vegetables including tomatoes, green chillies, cabbage, cauliflower, onion, lady fingers and cucumber in the rythu bazaars of the city registered a sharp dip when compared to earlier weeks.

The Hindu

A week ahead of Sri Lanka’s parliamentary elections R.A. Karunavathi, a farmer in Chandana Pokuna village in Polonnaruwa, located in the island’s North Central Province, is looking for a reason to vote. “Why not boycott? We are forced to think like that,” she says, obviously fatigued with polls and politicians.

Polonnaruwa district is known internationally for its evocative rock-cut Buddha sculptures and ancient city — now a UNESCO World Heritage Site — that one strand of popular history traces to the Cholas. It is also the country’s rice bowl, with the district’s farmers producing the highest amount — 3 lakh metric tonnes last year — of paddy in the country.

Indian Express

The Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) is the first universal basic income-type of scheme targeted towards landed farmers. It was introduced in December 2018 to manage agricultural stress. Initially, the scheme was targeted at small and medium landed farmers, but with the declining growth in gross value added of the agricultural sector, it was extended to all farmers in May 2019. The Union budget had allocated Rs 75,000 crore to this scheme in 2020-21.

Hindustan Times

Warming of Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean is likely to weaken the India monsoon further in the near future, which could be accentuated by land mass changes across the country, says a new study by the National Institute of Oceanography at Goa published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The study is significant as it reviewed the under sediment cores derived from the Krishna Godavari basin of the Bay of Bengal to understand how the monsoon rainfall pattern has changed in the past 2,000 years. Most of the studies on Indian monsoon pattern are based on temperature and rainfall variations available with the India Meteorological Department (IMD) since 1901 for land and sea.