-FirstPost.com The rollout of the goods and services tax (GST) starting 1 July has created a panic situation for the fertiliser industry mirroring a similar state of affairs a few weeks earlier with the consumer staple and home appliance manufacturers. An estimated 65 lakh tonne (lt) of bagged fertiliser material worth around Rs 9,500 crore already has the existing maximum retail price (MRP) printed on it. With the rise in GST rates,...
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Livestock economics: No more cows to come home for these farmers -Anju Agnihotri Chaba
-The Indian Express Punjab’s unique cattle breeding-cum-milk sale dairying model is under threat from gau rakshak activism and the Centre’s new animal trading rules. Randhawa and Gill are amongst Punjab’s many dairy farmers who have made the state into a major supplier of not just milk, but also milch animals. Gurdaspur (Punjab): “When there’s no land in our name, how would we now buy or sell cattle? Are they saying we...
More »Middle Earth Moguls -Pragya Singh
-Outlook Good monsoon or bad, glut or drought, boom or bust...it’s always fair weather for the range of middlemen who come between the farmer and consumer. An anatomy of the trade. One of the axioms of logic is called the Law of the Excluded Middle. Something has to be either true or false—there’s no middle ground. As we all know, economics works a bit differently. Facts can be fickle, data pliable, and...
More »Protect farmers, don't target them -Vandana Shiva
-AsianAge.com Now farmers have started to awaken the nation to the farming crisis with strikes in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. Indian civilisation is based on gratitude to our farmers and all beings who contribute to our food — annadata sukhibhava. Our traditional belief is “Uttam-kheti, madhyam-vyapar, neech-naukri”. The combination of the Green Revolution in Punjab imposed in the 1960s and the corporate globalisation “reforms” started in the 1990s have created policies for annadata...
More »In 'prosperous' Punjab, farmers battle uncertainty, rising costs of production -Manraj Grewal Sharma
-Hindustan Times Fatehgarh Sahib: He owns four acres of land, farms 20 acres more on lease, and has a debt of Rs 10 lakh. Gurmukh Singh, 44, is one of better-to-do farmers of Pandrali, a quiet, well-groomed village in Fatehgarh Sahib district with several newly-built houses, smooth streets and girls on scooters. It’s a picture that could well be captioned ‘prosperous Punjab’. But the genteel façade hides the struggles of the...
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