-Livemint.com The most glaring implication of the proposed deficiency payments is that it makes the state give up its responsibility of intervening in markets During the past few months, there has been a highly contested debate on the merits, viability and feasibility of crop insurance in India given the large number of small farmers and the large amount of subsidy involved that is not being effectively used as the coverage of...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: With back to back drought years putting farmers under tremendous stress, the Centre believes it's effort to bolster irrigation infrastructure and disburse relief to farmers after extreme weather events are falling short thanks to some states dragging their feet. Union agriculture ministry in its periodic review of these schemes found many states not up to the mark with minister Radha Mohan Singh asking them to pull...

-PTI NEW DELHI: Farmers have lost more than 10 million tonnes of rabi crops, valued at above Rs 20,000 crore, due to unseasonal rainfall and hailstorm in February-April this year, CSE said in a report. India may have to import 10 lakh tonnes of wheat in 2015-16 as about 68.2 lakh tonnes were lost due to unseasonal rainfall, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) said in its report, titled 'Lived Anomaly'. In...

-The Financial Express A new crop insurance scheme the Modi government is set to roll out shortly seeks to cap the premium paid by farmers at about 3% of the insured value. A new crop insurance scheme the Modi government is set to roll out shortly seeks to cap the premium paid by farmers at about 3% of the insured value, cover a substantial part of the country’s farmland and crop output...

-The Indian Express There is a worrying dearth of Indian economists working on agriculture today. In his classic Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went, John Kenneth Galbraith observed how the economics profession had a well-defined order of precedence. At the top were the economic theorists and specialists in banking and finance. At the bottom of the hierarchy were agricultural economists. George F. Warren from Cornell University was even worse — a...