Parashram Patil

For decades, agricultural policy has been guided by a curious fiction that the farmer is not quite a factor of production, but merely a facilitator of it. Governments measure yield per acre, monitor soil nutrients, subsidise fertiliser and fret over credit flows. Yet the most indispensable input of all, which is the physical and mental well-being of the person tilling the land, remains conspicuously absent from the ledger. In any conventional industry, the logic is straightforward. Machines...

Treating farmer health as capital could help unlock the next phase of Indian agricultural growth. India’s agricultural story has long been told through the language of inputs, usually better seeds, more irrigation or improved market access. These levers powered the Green Revolution and continue to underpin policy. But as farming confronts climate volatility, it is time to take a hard look at the cost of human labour, long regarded as a constant. The health of farmers is typically filed under...

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...