Indian Agriculture, Food Policy - IFP Services
The Hindustan Times of India has published Indian Vital Statistics - Fatal Figures :
* Hardly 10 per cent of farmers are covered by crop insurance.
* Debt drove nearly 1 lakh members of
farming community to commit suicide between 1998 and 2003, says a government report.
* 17,000
farmers and their kin killed themselves each year for six years.
* 12% of all suicides in the
country was in the farming community.
* 2002 worst year. 16% of suicides among farmers.
*
Agriculture provides nearly 600 million direct and another 200 million indirect jobs.
* The total
annual rural debt of Punjab was Rs 24,000 crore in 2003-04 -- is more than its gross annual
earnings from agriculture. (Source: The Telegraph, April 24, 2006)
* There is a total of about
455 million acres of land that is cultivated in India and only about a third of it is covered by
irrigation.
* The four states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Kerala have recorded
over 8,900 suicides between 2001-2002 and 2005-2006.
* 70% of the Andhra's 78 million people are
dependent on agriculture.
* Due to the acute distress, more than 1500 farmers committed suicide,
mainly in Wayanad district, which is unprecedented in the history of Kerala.
* Rural development
expenditure as percentage of GDP between 1985-1990 was 14.5%, which came down to 5.9% in 2000-01.
* The expenditure on agriculture research is only around 0.3 per cent of GDP.
Welcome to the premier
Indian Food Policy website. The Indian Food Policy web site, is a platform for
discussion of issues related to South East Asian food, agriculture and trade policy.
Every sixth human being on the planet resides in India. We believe democratic food policy is
meaningless rhetoric without listening to the views of the Indian farmer.
Global institutions,
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and drum up global concurrence without ascertaining the views of the Indian farmers vis a vis global
food policies can never be remotely democratic. Maybe their very mandate is explicitly undemocratic.
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We believe that transparency in
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population. What Indians eat cannot and must not be decided in closed secretive rooms or from other continents.
Indian farming, agriculture, food policy
