18 June, 2025Sowing sunshine: Can agriphotovoltaics offer a path to doubling farmers’ income?
In recent years, the contribution of agriculture and allied sectors to economic output has declined, with farmers’ real incomes virtually stagnating. This article demonstrates that new ideas such as...
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Bidisha Banerjee Subhodeep Basu Soham Roy 
16 June, 2025
- Perspectives
Information is power: ICT and agricultural productivity
One reason for low agricultural productivity in developing countries is that farmers lack sufficient information or guidance in the use of modern agricultural methods. This article examines the impact...
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Aranya Chakraborty Digvijay S. Negi Rahul Rao
- 07 April, 2025
- Articles
Impact of climate change on smallholder dairy farmers in India
A considerable number of agricultural households in India engage in livestock rearing and milk production to supplement their income and improve household nutrition. This article examines how global w...
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Amlan Das Gupta
- 10 February, 2025
- Articles
How new technologies can raise farm productivity
Lele and Goswami discuss the potential of new technologies in raising farm productivity, and the challenges involved in turning the power of information and other technologies into a farmer-friendly t...
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Sambuddha Goswami Uma Lele
- 06 December, 2017
- Articles
Facilitating investment in organic food business through the right policies
The Indian government has undertaken several policy initiatives to promote organic farming and organic food exports, and many domestic and foreign companies have responded positively to these measure...
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Souvik Dutta Arpita Mukherjee
- 25 September, 2017
- Articles
Middleman margins and market structure in West Bengal potato supply chains
Potato farmers in West Bengal sell to local middlemen because they lack direct access to wholesale markets. Middleman margins are large and there is negligible pass-through from wholesale to farm-gat...
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Sandip Mitra Dilip Mookherjee Sujata Visaria
- 22 September, 2017
- Articles
Demonetisation, cattle slaughter ban, and India's cyclical agrarian crisis
In this article, Parag Waknis discusses why India’s rural economy is always on the precipice of crisis, and how the recent shocks of demonetisation and cattle slaughter ban exacerbated the crisis by...
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Parag Waknis
- 04 August, 2017
- Perspectives
Are farm loan waivers really so bad?
Recent announcements by various state governments of their intent to waive farm loans to varying extents have been strongly criticised by the media and other commentators. In this article, Dr Pronab S...
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Pronab Sen
- 23 June, 2017
- Perspectives
Hazards of farm loan waivers
In theory, debt waivers are expected to induce the optimal level of effort from the debtor for loan repayment. However, repeated waivers may distort household expectations about credit contract enfor...
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Tanika Chakraborty Aarti Gupta
- 23 May, 2017
- Articles
Analysing the impact of government interventions in agriculture on consumption
In the context of bankruptcy, many important studies have examined the implications of debt relief on different real outcomes. However, the decision to file for bankruptcy could be endogenous; exami...
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Mrinal Mishra Prasanna Tantri Nagaraju Thota
- 31 March, 2017
- IGC Research on India
The Effects of Food Policy on Cropping Patterns and Income Distribution in Rural Bihar
Bihar is unusual among the Indian states in the extent to which it remains a rural economy; government food policy can have profound effects on the level and distribution of income in Bihar. The objec...
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Rajnish Kumar Rohini Somanathan
- 15 March, 2017
- IGC Research on India
How agricultural debt waiver impacts beneficiary households
How a large-scale and unanticipated debt-relief programme impacts beneficiary households is a question that has not been clearly answered by the existing literature. This column analyses the impact of...
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Mrinal Mishra
- 02 February, 2017
- Articles
Unified agricultural markets: Where are the reforms lacking?
In April 2016, Modi government launched the e-National Agriculture Market (e-NAM) platform – a pan-India electronic marketplace for trading of agricultural commodities. However, rather than ushering...
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Nidhi Aggarwal Sargam Jain Sudha Narayanan
- 02 January, 2017
- Articles
Indian agriculture: How to feed more people with fewer resources
While agriculture in India has achieved grain self-sufficiency, it has become cereal-centric, regionally-biased and resource-intensive. In this article, Swain, Price and Sharma discuss the rising res...
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Gareth Price Ira Sharma Ashwini K. Swain
- 05 July, 2016
- Perspectives
The crisis of farmer suicides
More than 15,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide per year, on average, in the last two decades – a suicide rate that appears to be higher than that of the general population. In this article,...
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Maitreesh Ghatak
- 04 May, 2016
- Perspectives
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Climate change and Indian agriculture
Indian agriculture remains vulnerable to the vagaries of weather, and the looming threat of climate change may expose this vulnerability further. This article presents findings from a study that uses ...
- Siddharth Hari Parth Khare Arvind Subramanian
- 16 August, 2018
- Articles
India's farm crisis: Decades old and with deep roots
In this Perspectives piece, Prof. Himanshu argues that the crisis in Indian agriculture today is not a new one; it goes back many years. Therefore, the problems of farmers cannot be addressed by the b...
- Himanshu .
- 12 April, 2019
- Perspectives
How new technologies can raise farm productivity
Lele and Goswami discuss the potential of new technologies in raising farm productivity, and the challenges involved in turning the power of information and other technologies into a farmer-friendly t...
- Sambuddha Goswami Uma Lele
- 06 December, 2017
- Articles