-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...

-The Indian Express Punjab is a case study in agricultural and economic mismanagement in India From the breadbasket of India, Punjab has become a basket-case economy. Endowed with ample water and good soil, Punjab’s happy, progressive people had a dream that is now a distant memory. Punjab’s decline started with its trifurcation. In its bid to establish a separate identity, the poli-tical establishment obsessed over a religious-political agenda and steered the state...

-The Indian Express The current crackdown on the pulses trade may do more harm than good in the long run. The government has reasons to be concerned over spiralling dal prices — even more so when arhar at Rs 200 per kg has become a major campaign theme in the ongoing Bihar assembly elections. But that does not justify the kind of desperate measures it has resorted to. Not only have...

-Livemint.com Water availability has not deteriorated only because of the poor monsoon Amartya Sen showed in his seminal work on famines that mass starvation is not necessarily the result of inadequate food supply. He opened up new areas of inquiry that focussed on what have come to be known as entitlement failures. Sen has famously argued that human mistakes forced people into starvation in Bengal in 1943 even though food production in...

-The Indian Express The Centre needs to wake up. Otherwise India may return to the shortages of the mid-1960s. The cumulative rain deficit in the current monsoon season stood at (-)12 per cent of the long period average (LPA) as on August 27. If the deficit continues at this level till the end of September, the IMD’s forecast would be coming true. Technically, like last year, this would also be a drought...