What's eating India's farms?
These numbers explain the pain in the hinterlands
52% portion of India’s farmlands that are not irrigated, and depend on increasingly erratic monsoonIn March, close to 40,000 farmers walked for six days from Nashik to Mumbai to make their demands heard by the state government. While some of them were Maharashtra-specific, the farming crisis is one that is countrywide. Last November, 184 farmer groups from Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Telangana congregated in New Delhi for a ‘protest walk’. In June 2017, six farmers were killed in police firing in Madhya Pradesh when they were agitating for better prices and loan waivers.We take a look at some numbers that broadly explain the issue.
(This story appears in the 13 April, 2018 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
