-Review of Agrarian Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1, January-June, 2021 This note analyses the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the production and cost of cultivation of crops grown in the monsoon (kharif) season. The note is based on a survey of 164 informants from 26 villages across 13 States of India. The survey, conducted by the Foundation for Agrarian Studies (FAS) between mid-September and mid-October, 2020, was based on telephone...

With the rise in Covid-19 daily new cases and daily new deaths since March this year, media reports (please click here and here) on migrant workers returning back to their native places (i.e. places of origin) from migration destinations (i.e. workplaces likes cities and large industrial towns to where the informal and low skilled workers from the marginalised sections of the society migrate seasonally, and sometimes for a longer duration,...

-Financial Express Only three crops -- groundnut, jowar and moong -- have recorded higher arrivals on year (see chart). Even in the case of jowar and moong, arrivals fell in the largest-producing states of Maharashtra (-39%) and Rajasthan (-7%), respectively. Amid the row over the three new federal farm laws aimed at giving unfettered market access to farmers, the producers of various crops seem to have started to rely much less on...

-The Indian Express In back-to-back moves aimed at controlling onion prices, the government has relaxed import norms and now reintroduced stock limits. Why have prices been rising, and how far can these moves check the rise? With less than a week to go for the Bihar elections, the Centre on Friday reintroduced the stock limit on onions — a move aimed at controlling rising prices, which crossed Rs 80 per kg in...

-The Telegraph The tearing hurry with which agriculture market reforms have been pushed through, without even consulting farmers, has resulted in huge farm protests in Punjab and Haryana At a time when I see euphoria among mainstream economists over the new set of agricultural reforms, media reports say that the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices has observed that only 12 per cent of India’s paddy cultivators were able to sell their...