India’s new role at the FAO offers an opportunity to put the health and productivity of fishers at the centre of the global blue economy. India’s recent election to chair the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) Sub-Committee on Fisheries Management marks a significant milestone for international maritime diplomacy. Backed by the strategic work of Dr. J. Balaji, India’s Alternate Permanent Representative to the FAO, this two-year term gives New Delhi an unprecedented

As water and climate become instruments of geopolitical leverage, India has an opportunity to turn agricultural resilience into a new form of South-South diplomacy. Climate change is making an old truth harder to ignore: food security is national security. As water becomes scarcer, harvests more erratic and trade policies more protectionist, agriculture is moving from the margins of geopolitics to its centre. Nowhere is this clearer than in Africa, where fragile food systems

Mills seek special subsidy Kolhapur: Despite an estimated 30-40 lakh tonnes of sugar being available in excess of domestic demand, the Centre is stepping up efforts to keep sugar prices under control. The Union Food Ministry has urged Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka to advance the 2026-27 sugarcane crushing season so that fresh sugar reaches the market before the existing stock is exhausted. Sugar mills, however, say an early start will come at a cost. They are seeki

India’s sugar crisis is less about one bad season than about the uneasy trade-offs between food, fuel, water and farm incomes India’s latest sugar-price shock is a reminder that agricultural markets rarely obey the neat logic of supply and demand. Retail sugar prices surged towards Rs. 62–Rs. 67 a kilogram before easing after government intervention. But the episode exposes a deeper problem: India is asking its sugar economy to serve too many objectives at once - support farm

From monsoon prediction to smarter supply chains, quantum computing could give Maharashtra’s agriculture a new technological edge. AI generated image Indian agriculture is approaching the limits of what conventional computing can comfortably handle. The modern farm is no longer governed by rainfall and soil alone. It sits at the intersection of increasingly volatile weather, crop biology, input prices, pest behaviour, transport networks and global markets. The challenge is no

Predictive and agentic intelligence can identify vulnerable farmers early, coordinate timely interventions and make agricultural supply chains more resilient. India’s artificial intelligence conversation has largely focused on productivity. Policymakers speak of higher yields, precision farming and digital marketplaces. Technology companies promise smarter irrigation, better weather forecasts and more efficient logistics. Yet one critical variable often remains missing from t

The next big opportunity for Maharashtra’s farmers may not lie only in bigger harvests, but in smarter markets. As India and the European Union move towards a Free Trade Agreement (FTA), the state has a chance to transform itself from a supplier of agricultural commodities into a global hub for high-value, sustainable food products. The India–France strategic partnership, traditionally anchored in defence, space, clean energy and the Indo-Pacific, is acquiring a new dimension

Maharashtra’s farm loan and power bill waivers offer immediate relief, but their real test lies in building a more resilient agricultural economy. Agricultural distress is rarely caused by a single factor. For millions of farmers, the crisis is the result of a difficult combination of erratic weather patterns, rising input costs, uncertain markets, mounting debt and inadequate access to affordable credit. In Maharashtra, where agriculture remains the backbone of rural livelih

While global farm policy obsesses over land, capital and climate, it still ignores the health of the person behind the plough. The world’s agricultural debates have acquired an oddly abstract quality. Ministers and leaders argue over climate finance, development banks model productivity curves, and economists refine forecasts for food security. Yet the central figure in agriculture - the farmer - often disappears into the spreadsheet. This omission is one reason why so many w

The global carbon market is quietly undergoing a profound transformation. For years, companies eager to offset emissions favoured inexpensive carbon credits generated by projects that merely avoided future emissions. Increasingly, however, investors, regulators and corporate buyers are demanding something more tangible: carbon that is actually removed from the atmosphere and securely stored. That shift is elevating nature-based solutions, particularly agroforestry, from a nic

Maharashtra’s enduring epidemic of farmer suicides is a saga of an agricultural policy that has repeatedly failed to reduce structural risk. Each election season, India’s farmers are the subject of political debate. Governments promise to write off loans, offer compensation packages, and set up new welfare programs. But as the ballots are counted, another grim statistic emerges from the villages of Maharashtra: another farmer has taken his own life. For almost three decades

The Farmer Health Capital theory reframes physical and mental well-being as productive economic assets, offering a preventive alternative to India's reactive farm policies. For decades, India’s policy interventions aimed at mitigating the chronic agrarian crisis have relied on a predictable set of macroeconomic levers: adjustments to the Minimum Support Price (MSP), post-crisis loan waivers, and input subsidies for seeds, power, and fertilisers. Despite these extensive fiscal

The economics of agricultural trade has rested on a convenient assumption that labour is a factor of production, much like land or capital. Workers appear in equations as an ‘input,’ their contribution measured largely through productivity and wages. Yet in the fields of the developing world, where agriculture remains intensely dependent on human effort, this abstraction obscures a costly reality. Farmers are not inexhaustible resources. Their health is an economic asset and

For decades, India’s economic planners have built elaborate models to estimate the returns on irrigation projects and farm mechanisation. Yet one critical asset remains largely invisible in the national balance sheet, which is the biological health of the farmer. This omission is becoming increasingly costly as India pursues its ambition of becoming a $5-trillion economy. A growing body of evidence suggests that the country's agricultural sector is sustained not merely by lan

AI generated image Mumbai: In the heartlands of the state, where erratic monsoons and price crashes routinely threaten agrarian livelihoods, farm loan waivers have transformed from emergency financial lifelines into anticipated political rituals. Over the last decade and a half, successive state governments have announced massive debt relief packages to alleviate farmer distress. But how effective have these multi-billion-rupee interventions been? A closer examination of the

India’s rural co-operatives are undergoing the biggest technological overhaul in their history. More than 61,000 Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS) have now been integrated into a unified digital ERP platform under the Ministry of Co-operation, transforming once paper-bound village societies into data-driven financial hubs. PACS are no longer mere credit counters. Increasingly, they distribute fertilizers, run Jan Aushadhi centres, lease farm machinery and serve as

From debt traps and failed irrigation to climate shocks and political neglect, the agrarian crisis in Vidarbha reveals the deep structural failures haunting India’s farming economy. Every monsoon, as clouds gather over the dry plains of eastern Maharashtra, famers in the Vidarbha region look up with a mix of hope and despair. They are hopeful, as rain means life for their crops. Fear because, rain or no rain, the debts remain, prices fall, and the future remains uncertain. Vi

For decades, India has approached food security as an engineering problem. Governments built granaries, expanded irrigation canals, subsidised fertilisers and fretted over logistics networks that could carry onions from Nashik or tomatoes from Kolar to distant urban markets. The vocabulary of policy was dominated by procurement, storage and distribution. Food security was measured in tonnes. Risk was measured in rainfall deficits. The farmer, paradoxically, was treated as inc

India speaks grandly of its infrastructure but is apathetic towards the health of its farmers. The Indian government speaks of grand projects like expressways, semiconductor plants, freight corridors and glittering digital stacks. Ministers speak confidently of transforming the economy into a USD 30 trillion behemoth by 2047, the centenary of independence and the symbolic horizon of ‘Viksit Bharat.’ While all this is well, an older form of infrastructure remains neglected: th

The silent crisis of hysterectomies among Maharashtra’s sugarcane workers reveals how a brutal labour system turns women’s bodies into relentless instruments of productivity. In Maharashtra’s sugar heartland, the harvest is more than just cane and crushing mills. It’s also a story about women whose bodies are hurt by poor working conditions, lack of medical care, and a labour system that doesn’t care about health. Hysterectomies have become a worrying sign of survival, not ch