Mother Dairy’s retail model helps farmers but is under pressure from chains Call it the Safal model. For close to 25 years, a large chunk of households in the National Capital Region have had access to fresh fruits and vegetables at affordable prices—at rates much lower than what the local vegetable and fruits market or the handcart vendor would charge. This was made possible by standing the concept of buying on...

While some may view the food security Bill as the instrument of combating poverty, this distinction belongs to the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the flagship anti-poverty programme of the United Progressive Alliance government. The proponents of the food security Bill at the National Advisory Council have promoted it as the instrument of fighting widespread and rising hunger, instead. But what is the empirical basis of the claims of widespread and...

-The Business Standard   Economists question veracity of the data; say too early for RBI to cut rates. Food inflation for the week ended December 10 fell to a four-year low of 1.81 per cent, after declining to 4.35 per cent last week. The decline is much sharper than what Chief Economic Advisor Kaushik Basu expected — he had predicted less than three per cent food inflation by early January. What’s more, many...

-The Times of India   Even though the residents of Guwahati have to buy their greens at exorbitant rates, farmers in the countryside are living in dire straits as the price at which they sell the vegetables have touched rock bottom. Last week, farmers in Barpeta, one of the vegetable-producing districts of the state, had to jettison cartloads of cucumbers on the street when the price of the produce touched 60 paise per...

-The Business Standard   Faced with a supply glut, potato farmers in Gujarat headed to streets and dumped thousands of kilos of potato in Deesa, a major potato market in the state on Tuesday. Farmers demanded an intervention from the state government with a financial assistance to the farmers, who are facing a steep fall in the potato prices at Rs 1 per kg in recent weeks. "We had approached the government about...