A compendium of field stories showcasing experiences from Asian and African countries, including India was launched. The compendium will help in capacity building and scaling up the best practices in the adoption of millets across the world. It also signifies the successful realization of the Mapping and Exchange of the …
Various efforts are on to popularise the use of millets. Farmers are realising the need for incorporating millets into their cropping system, writes Anitha Pailoor Mahadevi B Maregowda was overwhelmed. The unique taste of navane chakkuli prepared by her had attracted a large number of visitors. For the first time, …
This paper reviews recent evidence on food intake and nutrition in India. It attempts to make sense of various puzzles, particularly the decline of average calorie intake during the last 25 years. This decline has occurred across the distribution of real per capita expenditure, in spite of increases in real …
Is rising food price making you shrink your dinner spread? Don't. Why not try your hand at some millet recipes? That may not only bring down your food budget, but also enhance the nutritional value of your meals. But there is a small catch. You will have to visit the …
Underlying objective of food security programme in India is to ensure the availability of foodgrains to the common people at an affordable price. The PDS system in India is based on the wheat and rice model, which in many areas were never the staple grains for household consumption. It was …
a hybrid variety of pearl millet resistant to downy mildew (dm) has been developed jointly by researchers at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (icrisat) in Patancheru near Hyderabad and the Haryana Agricultural University (hau) located in Hissar. Caused by the fungus Sclerospora graminicola, dm is the …
It is ironic that while India ranks third in fertiliser use worldwide, it ranks 14 and 16 respectively in the production of rice and wheat. It is even more ironic that India’s fertiliser policy ensures precisely such a result. Fertiliser use in India is dictated by the larger perceived need …
Agricultural growth in India has always laboured under the burden of producing more. The idea was: grow only foodgrains. That meant: not ecologically adapted cereals such as millets, but rice and wheat. The green revolution programme was single-minded: it came up with hyv (high-yielding variety) seeds for rice and wheat …
A third factor has led to the current debility of soils in India: irrigation. That is to say, water over-use. To feed the rice-wheat mentality, net irrigated area rose from 20.8 million ha in 1950 to 53.5 million ha in 1995-1996. Fed on irrigation, the agricultural area grew from a …
Soils are a very slow renewable resource. To reclaim them requires, above all, a long-term plan. With falling productivity, the realisation has sunk in that soils cannot be blindly mined, and that humans cannot just plough through the ecology they interact with. apply gypsum: Seven lakh ha of land in …
What is soil? Nothing but simple clod, always taken for granted. But dig deeper, and you will find that this simple clod generates complex equations of survival and wealth, equity and polity. It is a big little ecological variable. Its influences remain hidden from us. function openpoptable(){ var popurl="http://dte-new/dte-new/html/20030131_cover2.htm" winpops=window.open(popurl,"","width=475,height=500, …
more means peacock in Hindi. Morena, a district in Madhya Pradesh known for its large population of peacocks, gets its name after the national bird. When about 77 birds died in Maharajpura and Sitapur villages of the district after they had consumed pesticide-laced grains of bajra (pearl millet), the national …
Bihar is a predominantly agricultural State with 86 per cent of her population depending upon agriculture. In my study of the National Income of Bihar published in the Indian Journal of Economics, July 1951, I had estimated the gross agricultural income of Bihar for the year 1846-47 at Rs. 230 …
