A distressing encounter in Maharashtra highlights the growing conflict between humans and leopards, with sugarcane farming playing a central role. Saluram Kargal, a farmer from Wadgaon Borwadi village near Pune, narrowly escaped a leopard attack that resulted in the loss of two of his goats and severe injuries to himself and his son. This incident,…
A recent official report has revealed a deeply worrying trend in Maharashtra’s Marathwada region. Over the past five years, from 2021 to 2025, more than 5,000 farmers have died by suicide. The year 2025 saw the highest number of these tragic deaths, with 1,129 farmers taking their own lives. Marathwada is made up of eight…
Food systems are routinely framed in terms of productivity, efficiency, technology, and markets. Policy debates focus on yields, supply chains, price stabilisation, and caloric availability. Yet this technocratic framing obscures a more fundamental question: justice. Who controls food systems, who bears their risks, whose knowledge is legitimized, and whose livelihoods are rendered expendable? When examined through…
India’s rural jobs debate is being rewritten. The question is no longer just “how many days of work,” but “what kind of work, for whom, and in service of which food system.” MGNREGA’s original promise of rights-based employment and regeneration of local commons now sits uneasily beside a push towards a more centralised, mission-style rural…
As we mark World Soil Day 2025 under the banner of “Healthy Soils for Healthy Cities,” the irony is stark. We are celebrating the vital link between urban resilience and soil health while staring down a barrel of data that suggests we are failing on both fronts. I see this year not just as a celebration, but as a…
India-US trade offs ?
India’s development model today rests on a fragile but politically convenient formula: chemicals for farmers, cash for voters.It is a system designed not to solve problems, but to manage them till the next election cycle. At the heart of this lies a political economy where fertilizer lobbies, agricultural subsidies, and now large-scale pre-election cash transfer schemes like Ladli/Ladki Behna define…
The Union Department of Fertilisers has taken strong action against unfair practices in the fertiliser market. They have cancelled or suspended over 4,200 licenses and registrations belonging to fertiliser distributors. These actions were taken because of black marketing, hoarding, and diverting fertiliser stocks away from farmers. This is a significant effort to protect farmers and…
India’s seed systems are among the oldest and most diverse in the world. Long before the state formalised agricultural regulations or private companies entered the sector, farmers, tribal communities, and women seed keepers nurtured, exchanged, and evolved seeds through relationships of trust, commons governance, and deep ecological knowledge. It is this decentralised, biodiversity-rich, community-led seed…
