Current Data on Oil Seeds Production in India

Last Updated: September 20, 2015
 A large variety of oil seeds are produced in India such as groundnut, castor seed, sesamum, rapeseed and mustard, linseed, Soyabean, sunflower, nigerseed and safflower. 

India holds a significant share in world oil seed production. It is second largest producer of groundnut after China and third largest producer of Rapeseed after China and Canada. 

In 1970s, India produced around 9 million tonnes of oil seeds. This figure has grown up to 25 million tonnes in nineties. 

Production & Acreage 

As per the fourth Advance Estimates for 2013-14, India’s oilseeds production is expected to be 32.9 million tonnes. The oilseed production in India has seen remarkable progress since 1951 when India produced a meagre 5.16 million tonnes of them. Currently, oil seeds share 14% of the area under major crops. 



India’s largest oilseed producing state is Gujarat, thanks to its position as top groundnut producing state of India. 

Rajasthan is India’s top Rapeseed & Mustard producing state, followed by Madhya Pradesh and Haryana. Almost half (48.12%) of Rapeseed and Mustard is produced by only Rajasthan. 

India’s top Soyabean producing state is Madhya Pradesh with a share of 44% in India’s total production of this protein rich crop. Among other oil crops, Karnataka is largest producer of Sunflower.

India’s Oilseed Factsheet 
Period →                                                    ‘71-72 to ’80-81 ‘81-82 to ‘90-91 ‘91-92 to ‘00-01 ‘01-02 to ‘10-11 
Average area under oilseed (million hectares) 17.01               20.09                25.5                25.67 
Average oilseed production (million tonnes)    9.17                 13.6                  21.33              25.08
Average oilseed yield (Kg/hectare)                 538.2               670.6                835.8              971.19 

Source: Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Department of Agriculture and Cooperation 
Last Updated: September 20, 2015

SOURCE : http://www.gktoday.in/blog/current-data-on-oil-seeds-production-in-india/

RESOURCE : GM Mustard, The Risks and Threats

Published on Sep 17, 2015

http://www.slideshare.net/RachnaArora4/gm-mustard-rsks-and-threats

EVENT : Mumbai Seed Savers Meet on 19th Sep 2015

The Seed Savers meet up has been scheduled! It will be on Saturday, September 19th, 3 pm at Flyover Farm, Mohammed Ali Road, Mumbai.

The address is: 
Rooftop of Mohamedi Manzil, above Ruhani Restaurant, opposite Zakaria Masjid bus stop, on main Mohammed Ali Road, very close to the Masjid Bunder signal.
​Google pin to Ruhani Restaurant: https://goo.gl/V6tmbU

 

The purpose of this meet up:
- To get all seed lovers and savers (at an organizational or individual level) in and around Mumbai together in one room, talking and sharing.
The tentative agenda:
- Introductions. Share and showcase seeds. What's happening with your own seed collection?
- Discuss why it is important to save seeds & start a Mumbai wide seed saving and exchange collective.
- What do we imagine in our collective seed saving future?
- How can we make this possible? What are the necessary long term, short term and immediate steps?
- What are we able to commit to?
Request:

- Please bring some seeds you consider special to show or share with others!

Please RSVP to this email address by Wednesday, September 16th.

If you have any questions or simply need directions please call me at 9820034213.

 

Looking forward to seeing you there,

Aditi Punj

www.beejpleej.org

NEWS: Inspired by Nana Patekar, Akshay Kumar Reaches Out to Drought-Hit Farmers

All India | Written by Tejas Mehta | Updated: September 15, 2015 22:32 IST

The agrarian crisis in Marathwada has been compounded for the fourth successive year.

MUMBAI:  Inspired by actor Nana Patekar, now Bollywood star Akshay Kumar has reached out to Maharashtra's drought-hit farmers who have committed suicide.

As the state faces one of its worst droughts especially in the Marathwada region, Mr Kumar has earmarked a sum of Rs. 90 lakh to financially help 180 families of those farmers who killed themselves because of the acute agrarian crisis. On Tuesday in Beed district in Marathwada, the actor distributed Rs. 50,000 to each of the 30 widows who had lost their husbands.
 

Nana Patekar inspires Akshay Kumar to help drought-hit farmers

Though Mr Kumar was not present, members of his office distributed the aid through cheques. The event was organized by Inspector General of Police Vishwas Nangre Patil who is currently posted in Aurangabad and was in Mumbai recently for the premiere of Mr Kumar's film.

"Akshay had invited me and during the interval, I spoke to him about the drought in Marathwada and the plight of farmers. I showed him a video of how actors Nana Patekar and Makrand Anaspure were helping farmers. So that's when he expressed his desire to help but he wanted to do it discreetly and silently," Mr Patil said.

The largesse follows Mr Patekar and Mr Anaspure's efforts in various parts of the state to financially support widows of farmers. The duo has already been able to reach out to over 300 families in Marathwada and Vidarbha.

Earlier this month, while speaking to NDTV, Mr Patekar said that he couldn't sit at home and watch farmers die. While Mr Patekar initially began by diving into his own earnings, soon contribution from well-wishers across the world began aiding their movement.

But the scale of the crisis, Mr Patekar believes, could have dangerous ramifications.

"There could be a farmers' revolution. If farmers can kill themselves, they could kill others too and if this thought of a 'revolution' persists, farmers could become Naxals," he claims.

Hit by a third straight drought, in just over 8 months nearly 700 farmers have committed suicide in Marathwada, whereas in 2014, 574 farmers killed themselves.

SOURCE : http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/inspired-by-nana-patekar-akshay-kumar-reaches-out-to-drought-hit-farmers-1218002

NEWS : Lessons for the govt to help crisis-hit farmers

September 14, 2015 10:54 IST

 

The monsoon is our finance minister and it is not just capricious, but perhaps the most globalised Indian. We need to invest in the science of monsoons and weather forecasting, notes Sunita Narain.

This is our season of despair. This year, it would seem, the gods have been most unkind to Indian farmers.

Early in the year came the weird weather events, like hailstorms and freak and untimely rains that destroyed standing crops. Nobody knew what was happening.

After all, each year we witness a natural weather phenomenon called the "western disturbance" - winds that emanate from the Mediterranean and travel eastward towards India.

What was new this year was the sheer "freakiness" of these disturbances, which brought extreme rain with unusual frequency and intensity.

More importantly, instead of "breaking" over the Himalayas, as these disturbances are prone to do, these winds with moisture travelled eastward towards Bengal and even southward towards Madhya Pradesh. Meteorologists were spooked.
And farmers, watching their standing crops destroyed before their eyes, were caught off guard.

Their pain was palpable. My colleagues who went to understand what was happening in rural Uttar Pradesh after these events came back with tales of utter shock.

Farmers were already caught in a spiral of debt because of the increasing cost of agriculture and now this. It was nothing less than carnage. 
But this was only the beginning of the year, the first cropping season.

Then came the whopper of a drought season, linked to El Niño - the warming of the Pacific that gives the monsoon a fever.

In many parts of the country, this would be the second or third or even the fourth consecutive monsoon failure. It is a terrible situation, with no water for crops, livestock or drinking in many parts.
The question is: will it end soon, or is it a beginning, a glimpse of what the future looks like?

The answer to this question holds the difference between life and death, literally.
The fact is if we dismiss this season of despair as a freak year, then we will never put into place the corrections so desperately needed in a future that is even more risky and makes us even more vulnerable.

Meteorologists will tell you that the weather is becoming more erratic, more confounding and definitely more devastating.

Even if they hesitate to use the word "climate", they will agree that something new is afoot. In other words, this is not just natural weather variability, but portends long-term changes.So what do we do?

First, we need to invest big time in weather sciences. This is where our future security lies.

The monsoon is our finance minister and it is not just capricious, but perhaps the most globalised Indian. We need to invest in the science of monsoons and weather forecasting.

In the last Budget, there was across-the-board cut in the money allocated to all scientific ministries.

This means institutions following and learning the monsoon, like the Pune-based Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, could see as much as a 25-30 per cent reduction in their annual budget.

This is short-sighted, if not downright foolish. We need to spend more, not less, on this lifeline science.
Second, we need to do much more to fix our agrarian crisis. It is clear that farmers are caught in a double bind.

On the one hand, costs of all inputs, particularly labour and water, are increasing and on the other hand, there are controls on food prices.
Our food pricing policy is built on the premise that we are a poor country, so consumers must be protected. But this means farmers - who are also consumers of food - are not paid remunerative prices for their product.

And all the big talk about deregulation and ease of doing business never makes it to their fields.

They are restrained in where they can sell; prices are artificially "fixed"; and when shortages grow, government rushes to buy from heavily subsidised global farms. This cannot go on. 
Third, we need to plan for development knowing that weather will be more variable and more extreme. This means doing all that we know has to be done.

There is no rocket science here. Build water and drainage infrastructure that can both hold water when there is excess rain and recharge groundwater when rain fails.

Again, in its last Budget, the government has slashed investment in irrigation. We are not even using the optimal potential of rural employment to build water security.

We have just not understood that in a climate-risked India, water has to be our obsession. Infrastructure - everything from cities and roads to ports and dams - must be built in a way that they are compliant with best environmental safeguards.
Fourth, knowing that building resilience and adapting to these changes is not enough, we need to vastly strengthen systems to compute farmers' loss and pay for damage - quickly and properly.

At present, our so-called crop insurance schemes are poorly designed and even more poorly executed. Once again, this cannot go on.
Let's get our heads out of the sand and smell the wind. Only then can we end the killing fields.

The writer is at the Centre for Science and Environment.

SOURCE : http://www.rediff.com/business/report/column-lessons-for-the-govt-to-help-crisis-hit-farmers/20150914.htm

ACT! Let us protest the CNN-IBN and Monsanto nonsense on Smart Agriculture!

A programme in partnership with Monsanto that NDTV was forced to dump due to viewer pressure (many of you were actually part of that protest action, if you remember), is now being picked up by CNN-IBN to pass off their utter nonsense as Smart Agriculture!! 

We need to protest this spread of falsehoods and faulty solutions.

 

Most of you are on facebook and twitter. Come on, get onto your fb pages and twitter accounts and start protesting this nonsense dumped on viewers. This is what I posted.

https://www.facebook.com/cnnibn?fref=ts is their facebook page. 

SHAME on @ibnlive for passing off Monsanto nonsense as smart agri; prgm dumped by @ndtv respecting viewers' sentiments, picked up by@ibnlive

Take 5 minutes off to do this, please. Please also forward this message onto other groups that you are a part of.

SOURCE : Egroup

दिल्ली विश्िविद्यालय का जीन संिर्धित (GM) सरसों: Hindi briefing paper

Please find attached a hindi briefing paper on Delhi University's Genetically Modified (GM) mustard.

 

The english version is downloadable here: http://indiagminfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/DU-GM-MUSTARD-BRIEFING-PAPER-coalition-final-jul10-2015.pdf

 

SOURCE : Egroup

NEWS : Land law not the only rollback: Seeds Bill put on hold over ‘GM’ clause

The Indian Express

The move comes despite three rounds of inter-ministerial consultations on the Seeds Bill, during which all ministries agreed to its major provisions, including five recent amendments.

It’s not just the Land Acquisition Bill, the NDA government has also put on hold proposed amendments to the Seeds Bill, mainly due to a clause on the use of genetically modified (GM) seeds that it fears would portray it as being anti-farmer.
The final proposal on the Seeds Bill was submitted to the Cabinet Secretariat by July-end to be brought before the Cabinet for approval so that it could be pursued in the Rajya Sabha during the monsoon session.
However, following the backlash against the land acquisition Bill, which created a scare among farmers, and with Bihar elections around the corner, the Cabinet Secretariat has been directed not to list the Seeds Bill, for now.

The move comes despite three rounds of inter-ministerial consultations on the Seeds Bill, during which all ministries agreed to its major provisions, including five recent amendments. The Bill was first introduced in Rajya Sabha in December 2004.

Among the proposed amendments is a clause to ensure uniformity in laws relating to the import and export of seeds and use of GM seeds with existing national regulations.
However, many BJP-ruled states, such as Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, have denied permission for field trials on GM seeds. Non-BJP ruled states, such as Bihar, West Bengal, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, are also opposed to the introduction of GM seeds and plant material.

Initially, the amendments were perceived as pro-farmer as they were aimed at regulating seeds and planting material to ensure their quality, increase private participation in production and distribution, liberalise imports, and protect the rights of farmers.

This was what prompted the NDA government to take up the decade-old Bill and circulate the first Cabinet draft to relevant ministries for comments in November 2014. The additional amendments were incorporated this April and the proposal was re-circulated.

Based on the ministries’ feedback, the final proposal was readied within two months and submitted to the Cabinet Secretariat before it was put on hold.

Incidentally, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced on Sunday that his government would not re-promulgate the controversial ordinance on land acquisition which expired on Monday. He also declared the government’s readiness to incorporate any suggestions in the land bill, which is pending in Rajya Sabha.


SOURCE : http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/land-law-not-the-only-rollback-seeds-bill-put-on-hold-over-gm-clause/