Swaminathan promises plan to raise rice yields

The National Commission on Agriculture would suggest ways for increasing productivity in rice cultivation and eradication of gender inequality among the farmers, its chairman M S Swaminathan said recently.

At a seminar on 'Gender Concerns and Food Security Issues in Rice Livelihood Systems in India', he said recent trends impacting rice farming were relevant both for food security and gender concerns.

The impact of the price and profitablity changes, negative trend in traditionally canal irrigated rice growing areas and the shift of land, both in irrigated and unirrigated agriculture to commercial crops, were the threats faced by rice based farming systems, he said.

Women played a major role in rice farming and their role could not be overlooked, Swaminathan said.

P Sainath, associate editor, (rural), The Hindu, said most of the suicides by farmers in Andhra Pradesh were due to loans taken by them for installing deep borewells. Most of the wells did not yield water and the farmers were compelled to take the extreme step.