All Agriculture & Markets Content
18 published pieces
PM POSHAN + Mission Shakti + Odisha Millet Mission — The Triple Convergence That Feeds Children, Empowers Women, and Markets Tribal Grain
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TRIFED and MSP for Minor Forest Produce — Tribal Communities as Market Actors, Not Forest Labourers
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Odisha Millet Mission — How One State Reversed a Fifty-Year Decline in Tribal Food
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PM-KISAN + CM-KISAN — The Stackable Income Floor for Odisha's 51 Lakh Farm Families
| Parameter | PM-KISAN (Central) | CM-KISAN (State) |
Samaj Pragati Sahayog — A Million Acres of Tribal Land, Transformed from Within
In 1994, Nivedita Banerji started a stitching centre in a remote village in Dewas district, Madhya Pradesh. The village was in the ghaat-neeche — the valley below the Narmada plateau, a tribal pocket of Bhil and Bhuiya communities locked into what researchers describe as "endurin...
Naandi Foundation — The Experiment That Made Poverty History in Araku
In 1999, Adivasi families in the Araku Valley of Andhra Pradesh's Eastern Ghats were selling wild coffee to middlemen for a few rupees a kilogram. The forest was degrading. Youth were migrating. Twenty-six years later, Araku Coffee is served at artisan cafes in Paris and Bengalur...
BAIF Development Research Foundation — 81 Million Trees and the Cattle That Changed Rural India
In 1967, Manibhai Desai — a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi who had worked with the Gandhian movement since India's independence — founded the Bharatiya Agro Industries Foundation in Urulikanchan near Pune. His starting question was specific: why do India's rural poor remain poor desp...
PRADAN — The Organisation That Taught India How to Organise Rural Women
In 1987, before Self-Help Groups were a government programme, before NRLM existed, before anyone used the phrase "community-based livelihoods" in a policy document, PRADAN put twelve rural women in a room in a village in eastern India and asked them to save money together. The ex...
Digital Green — The Farmer Who Is the Teacher
Agricultural extension in India has followed the same model for decades: a government extension worker, trained at an agricultural university, visits a village and demonstrates a new technique to a group of farmers. The problem is not with the technique. The problem is with the d...
Agragamee — Forty-Four Years of Asking Why Hunger Persists in a Land of Abundance
Kashipur block sits in the Rayagada district of Odisha's Eastern Ghats — mineral-rich, forest-abundant, and home to Kondh tribal communities who have farmed these hills for centuries. The aluminium companies saw bauxite. Agragamee, which began work here in 1981, saw something dif...
FPO Market Linkage — Building Buyer Relationships That Last
Before designing market linkage approaches, understanding why institutional buyers and processors often resist direct FPO engagement prevents wasted effort.
Peer Video Agricultural Extension — Making It Work for Tribal Odisha
The explanation for why it works is as important as that it works: unlike a government extension agent visiting once with a demonstration, video can be viewed repeatedly, at the farmer's pace, by multiple household members including those who couldn't attend the demonstration. Th...
FPO Working Capital and Credit — Solving the Finance Gap
The working capital cycle for an agricultural FPO is specific and predictable. During harvest season, the FPO needs to pay member farmers for their produce at procurement — before the FPO has received payment from its buyers. The lag between paying farmers and receiving buyer pay...
Climate-Resilient Agriculture for Tribal Farmers — Building From What Exists
Odisha has always been weather-volatile. The state experiences cyclones, droughts, floods, and erratic monsoons — sometimes in the same year. What is changing under climate change is the frequency and unpredictability of extremes:
NTFP Market Development — From Forest Produce to Fair Price
The research from Jharkhand (directly comparable to Odisha's tribal forest districts) found that NTFP collectors face: price monopoly by middlemen who control both pricing and weighing; lack of market price information that would allow any negotiation; transport costs that make i...
Millet Value Chains — The Odisha Millet Mission Model and What It Teaches
Before the Odisha Millet Mission was conceived in 2017, finger millet (ragi), little millet (suan), kodo millet and other traditional millets were in steady decline across Odisha's tribal districts. The reason was not agronomic — millets are superbly adapted to Odisha's rainfed h...
Farmer Producer Organisations — Building Them to Last
A Farmer Producer Organisation is a legal entity — typically registered as a Producer Company under the Companies Act — owned and governed by its farmer members. It is different from a cooperative (though similar in principle) and different from an NGO (it is a business entity th...
Agriculture, Handicrafts & Market Connectivity in Odisha: From Subsistence to Sovereignty
A Dongria Kondh weaver in Rayagada sits with her handloom and produces fabric that, in any urban market in India or Europe, would command a price that would transform her household economy. It takes her three days to produce one piece. The trader who comes to her village pays her...