-Livemint.com It is important to give preference to those approaches that help the poor the most for every rupee spent, no matter how they are labelled Sometimes in life, it is clear that the direct approach isn’t the best one. This is true in many areas, even when it comes to policymaking. Take, as an example, the area of extreme poverty. It seems logical, at first, that the most effective response should...

-The Indian Express Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana does not inspire confidence of farmers. They have to wait for months, sometimes years to get compensation. This article is the second in the series assessing the performance of the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre in the agri-food space over the last four years. The first one appeared in this newspaper on May 2 (IE, ‘Four years of neglecting farmers’). Here we look...

-Financial Express The PMFBY involves farmers, banks, state and central government, insurance companies and re-insurers. This article is second in the series to assess performance of BJP-led NDA government at the Centre in agri-food space over the last four years. The first one appeared in this paper on April 30 (goo.gl/AGnEaJ).Here, we look at BJP’s promise in its manifesto, namely, “implement a farm insurance scheme to take care of crop loss”....

-The Indian Express The crop in a well-marked plot of this field is, then, harvested, threshed, winnowed and weighed. If the produce contains moisture, it has to be dried first before weighing. Crop cutting experiments (CCE) have traditionally been conducted to obtain reliable average yield rates for estimation of agricultural production. These are mostly done by district/subdivision-level officials from the revenue, economics and statistics or agriculture departments of the concerned state governments....

-PTI The Centre has allowed states to set up their own insurance companies for implementing Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), a senior Agriculture Ministry official said today. The move comes after several requests from states as well as observations made by Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) in its 2017 report that old crop insurances schemes which have now been merged with PMFBY, were poorly implemented during 2011-2016. "We have allowed the states...