Parashram Patil

Until agricultural productivity is prioritized, Maharashtra will remain trapped in a paradox of plenty without prosperity. Agriculture in India is often discussed as a story of prices and protests. Far less attention is paid to the quieter but more decisive force shaping farm incomes that is productivity. Yields determine not just how much farmers earn, but how competitive states are, how resilient agriculture becomes to climate stress, and how credible promises of ‘doubling incomes’ really...

India’s food security rests not just on grain and groundwater, but on the steadily eroding bodies of the farmers who produce it. India’s debate on food security is oddly bloodless. Policymakers pore over spreadsheets tracking seed varieties, fertiliser subsidies and grain reserves, while television panels argue over procurement targets and buffer stocks. Yet amid this obsession with inputs and outputs, one variable is conspicuously absent: the physical health of the human being who grows the...

In India’s interminable debates over agricultural prices, one constant is striking by its absence. Policymakers argue over fertiliser subsidies, diesel prices and monsoon forecasts with the precision of book-keepers. Yet the farmer, who absorbs the shocks of all these variables, is reduced to a cipher. In the spreadsheets that govern Minimum Support Prices (MSP), labour is a fixed input, assumed to endure endlessly. The physical and mental toll of farming in form of the stress owing to...