Ramesh Singh Test: Agriculture & Food Management- 1

There are certain special terms used to understand the cropping seasons of India. The agricultural crop year in India is from July to June. The Indian cropping season is classified into two main seasons- (i) Kharif and (ii) rabi based on the monsoon.

• The Kharif cropping season is from July to October during the South West/Summer Monsoon and

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  The Rabi cropping season is from October to March (North-East/Returning/Winter Monsoon).

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  The crops grown between March and June are summer crops, known as zaids.

   

   

   

   

• As the inputs of the Green Revolution were costlier, its output naturally was to be costlier.

• To fight the situation there should have been a time-bound and target-oriented macro-economic policy support, which could deliver a comparative increase in the purchasing capacity of the masses to make food affordable for them. India badly failed in it.

• The crisis was managed by throwing higher and higher subsidies ultimately affecting government expenditure on the infrastructural shortcomings in the agriculture sector.

• Family holding - which gives work to an average size family having one plough under the traditional farming system.

• Economic holding - which ensures a minimum satisfactory standard of living in a family.

• Optimum holding - the maximum size of the holding which must be possessed and owned by a family.

• (i) Tenancy reforms provided tenants with rights, but only 4 percent of the total operated areas in the country (14.4 million hectares of the operated area by 11 million tenants by 1992).

• (ii) Redistribution of ownership rights of the land took place, but only up to 2 per cent of the total operated area in the country (less than 2 million hectares among the 4.76 million people by 1992).

• (iii) Taken together, the whole process of land reforms could benefit only 6 percent of the operated area of the country with a negligible socio-economic positive impact.

Programme (NLRMP), started in 2008, aims at updating and digitising land records by the end of the Twelfth Plan. Eventually, the intent is to move from the presumptive title (where registration of a title does not imply the owner's title is legally valid) to a conclusive title (where it does).

• It is the introduction of new techniques of agriculture, which became popular by the name of Green Revolution (GR) in the early 1960s—at first for wheat and by the next decade for rice, too.

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  It revolutionised the very traditional idea of food production by giving a boost by more than 250 per cent to the productivity level.

• Environmental degradation: Due to excessive and uncontrolled use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides have degraded the environment by increasing pollution levels in land, water and air.

• In India, it is more due to deforestation and extension of cultivation in ecologically fragile areas

• Minimum Support Price (MSP) is a form of market intervention by the Government of India to insure agricultural producers against any sharp fall in farm prices and a guaranteed price to save farmers from distress sale.

• The MSPs are announced at the beginning of the sowing season for certain crops based on the recommendations of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP, 1985).

• The major objectives are to support the farmers from distress sales and to procure food grains for public distribution.

• The Market Intervention Scheme (MIS) is similar to MSP, which is implemented on the request of state governments for procurement of perishable and horticultural commodities in the event of fall in market prices.

• The scheme is implemented when there is at least 10 per cent increase in production or a 10 per cent decrease in the ruling market prices over the previous normal year.