Authentic and authoritative, this presentation shares a comprehensive overview of the extensive research undertaken by the Agro Economic Research Centers (AERCs) and the concerns confronting Indian agriculture. Established across the states in India to provide policy feedback to the Ministry of Agriculture, the AERCs generated many important research initiatives and debates over five decades. This second volume focuses on the problems confronted at the regional level by each of the participating states.

Agriculture and allied sectors, unquestionably, are considered to be the largest source of livelihood in India contributing largely to the GDP of the country. However, despite a significant increase in the production of food grains, the agriculture sector has been facing innumerable challengesprimarily because of its dependency on natural resources, which have shrunk due to increasing demographic and socioeconomic pressures. This book, a study assigned by the Ministry of Agriculture, studies different facets of agriculture and allied sectors. It provides an overview of Indianagriculture, and presents an analysis of its performance over the years. Showcasing the issues faced in the development of agriculture, it captures the interventions and initiatives of the government for the development of Indian agriculture.

This volume examines the transitions in Indian agriculture since the 1980s, and emphasizes upon the role of neoliberal policies and their impact. The essays presented here deal with a range of pertinent and contemporary issues, including global food security, livelihoods of agricultural labourers, and public and private investment. These weave together glimpses of the impasse faced by petty commodity producers (marginal and small farmers) and their subsequent economic distress and social exclusion. Comprehensive in analysis, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of agricultural economics, political economy, political science and public policy.

In theory, chemical-free sustainable agriculture not only has ecological benefits, but also social and economic benefits for rural communities. By removing farmers' expenses on chemical inputs, it provides them with greater autonomy and challenges the status quo, where corporations dominate food systems. In practice, however, organisations promoting sustainable agriculture often maintain connections with powerful institutions and individuals, who have vested interests in maintaining the status quo. This book explores this tension within the sustainable farming movement through reference to three detailed case studies of organisations operating in rural India.

Agriculture is a broad subject. After passing graduation, higher degrees are done in specialized field of Agriculture so there is no need to read all Agriculture subjects in M. Sc. and Ph. D. But for the preparation of various agriculture competition examinations students have to read all the basic books of Agriculture to cover syllabus. That time most of students don’t have all the necessary books and too much time to read them. Therefore to overcome these problems we write this book through reading various books and other sources of Agriculture to cover brief and best information of subjects (Agronomy, Genetics and Plant Breeding, Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry, Agricultural Microbiology, Physiology, Agricultural Entomology, Plant Pathology, Horticulture, Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Extension And Agricultural Statistics) in one book. The students will treat this book as a competitive book not a text book for various degree courses.

Population explosions have always pushed India into many deep-rooted socio-economic bottlenecks. India is home to one third of the globe’s poverty-ridden and hunger-prone population, despite the undoubted availability of and access to food grains. This study explores the causes of and solutions to the prevalence of hunger and malnutrition at the grassroots level. Although India’s spending on protecting its boundaries has increased massively, there does not seem to have been as much emphasis on protecting its citizens. There can be no doubt that food security involves the simultaneous growth in demand and supply of food grains. As such, the book analyses the supply-side background behind the accomplishment of food security. It explores the nature, prospects and challenges ahead for Indian agriculture. Food grain production can be enhanced on a par with increasing demand only when hurdles confronting agriculture are addressed.

From a country plagued with chronic food shortage, the Green Revolution turned India into a food-grain self-sufficient nation within the decade of 1968-1978. By contrast, the decade of 1995-2005 witnessed a spate in suicides among farmers in many parts of the country. These tragic incidents were symptomatic of the severe stress and strain that the agriculture sector had meanwhile accumulated. The book recounts how the high achievements of the Green Revolution had overgrown to a state of this ‘agrarian crisis’. In the process, it also brings to fore the underlying resilience and innovativeness in the sector which enabled it not just to survive through the crisis but to evolve and revive out of it. The need of the hour is to create an environment that will enable the sector to acquire the robustness to contend with the challenges of lifting levels of farm income and coping with Climate Change. To this end, a multi-pronged intervention strategy has been suggested. Reviving public investment in irrigation, tuning agrarian institutions to the changed context, strengthening of market institution for better farm-market linkage and financial access of farmers, and preparing the ground for ushering in technological innovations should form the major components of this policy paradigm.

This volume is the twelfth in the series ‘Land Reforms in India’. The essays in this volume bring out the multi-dimensional aspects of the agrarian crisis, and its impact on farmers’ suicides leading to public policy. A distinctive feature of this collection is its holistic approach towards viewing farm sector distress, instead of looking for isolated causes and solutions.

This book locates the malignant causes behind the factors leading to farmers’ suicides in India. It argues that not only a combination of innovative managerial and economic policies is required to make farming profitable, but also food production within the carrying capacity of soil, water, forests and economic and social resources must still be maintained. It brings together diverse themes, such as farming development and suicide statistics, as well as the developmental inertia evident in farmers’ welfare policy history. The book stresses the need to go beyond the narrow crop economics of minimum support price utility and towards recognizing the farm household economic nature of farming, reinventing the uniqueness of farmers as a productive class engaged in converting cosmic elements into food and adopting the budgetary support approach to bail out the farmers from the suicidal, debt-multiplying, production support approach. Lucid and topical, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of political studies, political sociology, agricultural economics, political economy, public policy, sociology, agrarian and rural development studies, as also to policy analysts, governmental bodies and civil society activists.