Sunday HINDU newspaper is where longer articles are read more often. So, it was not surprising that there was an article targeting the funds allocation for the promotion of natural farming in union budget in this newspaper on 28th July 2024 (link). While the initial part of the article tried to pretend a neutral stand, the title itself was a give away (and considering how many people today don't read articles beyond the title, 
this was clearly meant to influence) - "Should India focus on natural farming?" the summary that came as a sub-text (which people in policy making may get to read), added all the suspicions that people use against natural farming since a long time now, viz., yield, productivity, population and Sri Lanka.
While most of these could have been arguments written 25 years ago and since then every time there has been any push from the government side to talk /think of organic / natural farming, ever since Sri Lankan economic melt down happened, it is cited in every such propaganda write-up by the chemical lobby. (to be fair, there was no reference to the antecedents of this author, though a byline indicated that the person is considered an expert by the newspaper).
The truth is government pushing about a crore farmers to adopt natural farming methods would mean an enormous saving on the fertilizer subsidy, apart from ensuring better nutrition security for the country. The discourse among informed circles moved from food security to nutrition security about a decade ago, so, this kind of lazy writing is outright insulting genuine 'experts' (the nameless category of people that the article uses as a peg to hang the recycled arguments). Especially so, after Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) scientists made the shocking admission that the staple rice and wheat High Yielding Varieties (HYV) have fallen consistently in their nutritional properties over the last decades and will contribute negatively to nutrition. This was last November (link). With land under agriculture going down and absentee landlordism increasing, there is a need to work on the land usage in rural areas and ensure soil quality improvement to ensure better nutritious food to be produced. Soil nutrition across India has been on the decline for a long time, it is critical that this be arrested and it cannot be done through chemical farming.
Much before the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture (ASHA) had published a series of over 500 peer reviewed papers by Indian agricultural scientists in which they had recorded natural / organic farming productivity being at par and even better than the chemical agriculture (link). This was done to disprove the continuously perpetrated myth that natural farming will necessarily bring down yields and will impact food security.
As per the current data of 'certified' organic data and recent agricultural statistics of govt. of India, the total area under organic (certified, in-conversion and wild collection all put together) adds upto about 5% and the total production just over 1%. A crore farmers moving into natural farming is taking about 8% of the total agriculture land holding population, while this maybe an aspiration, how much does it translate into land being converted or production remains to be seen.
Without having data of any kind, such propaganda articles do not help in any way to understand the reality and are toxic in their intent as much as the chemicals laden farming practice that they promote, both do not enhance our wellbeing.
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