Parashram Patil

For a country that still depends on the monsoon, India has grown surprisingly dependent on the Middle East. Not for rain, but for the fuel and fertilizers that keep its farms running. In an era of proliferating conflicts, especially the chronic instability across West Asia as evinced by the Iran conflict, that dependence is proving costly. The connection between geopolitics and the price of tomatoes in Pune is no longer abstract. When tensions flare in the Gulf, crude prices spike, gas...

India’s dependence on West Asian fertiliser routes has turned the Iran war into a domestic agricultural risk. When geopolitics intrudes upon agriculture, the consequences are measured in delayed sowing, rising costs and anxious farmers scanning uncertain skies. With no sign of the ongoing Iran war receding anytime soon, the prospect of a prolonged disruption in fertiliser supply, particularly through the narrow maritime chokepoint of the Strait of Hormuz, poses a tangible threat to India’s...

In India’s farm policy, arithmetic often collides with reality. Nowhere is this more evident than in Maharashtra, where the official logic of Minimum Support Prices (MSP) struggles to keep pace with the lived economics of cultivation. As the 2025–26 agricultural season unfolds, fresh evidence from the state’s Agricultural Price Commission suggests that the gap between what farmers spend and what they earn is widening. At first glance, Maharashtra appears an agricultural powerhouse. Its farms...