One is almost certain to hear this from an economist that if something is available at free of cost or at a subsidised rate thanks to government intervention, then people tend to overuse or overconsume such goods/ commodities. So, the best solution is to create a market for such 'almost freely available' or 'highly subsidised' goods or commodities. Once people start paying to use or consume such goods/ commodities, they...
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Jaideep Hardikar gives an intimate account of India’s farm crisis -Manu Moudgil
-The Tribune A farmer ends his life every 30 minutes in India. There are some who don’t end up in this pile of statistics and are saved through timely action of family and friends. Ramrao Panchleniwar, a cotton grower in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region, is one such survivor. He wished to drown his financial worries in two bottles of insecticide in 2014. In this book titled after him, Ramrao’s life and near-death...
More »Debunking the myth of APMCs regulating agricultural marketing in a real world
When one of the three farm laws i.e., The Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020 was enacted last year, it was argued by its proponents that the legislation would allow the farmers to sell their produce (and the traders to purchase that produce) outside the Agricultural Produce Market Committee-APMC mandis after crop harvesting. In a way, that particular piece of legislation was enacted to end the...
More »Farmers in eastern India see little hope in protest -Priscilla Jebaraj and Vignesh Radhakrishnan
-The Hindu They have not got many of the benefits that the new laws threaten to take away. As the movement against the agricultural reform laws builds towards its one year anniversary, it is clear that the bulk of farmers in eastern Indian States have not been as motivated to join the agitation as their counterparts in the northwest, as they have not even experienced many of the benefits that the laws...
More »Are we witnessing depeasantisation in Indian agriculture?
The newly released Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households and Land and Livestock Holdings of Households in Rural India (NSS 77th Round) establishes the fact that the farm households are more and more relying on wage incomes instead of 'net incomes from crop cultivation' for their livelihoods. In Marxian lexicon, proletarisation (a term that we can loosely use for depeasantisation) refers to the process in which the farmers/ tillers are...
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