-TheWire.in Unlike China which supported productivity-enhancing R&D investments, India’s focus has been on politically-driven subsidies that mainly benefit large farmers. We saw the trailer two years ago. TV news visuals of the plight of thousands of rural poor marching to Mumbai shocked the relatively affluent residents of India’s financial capital. The March 2018 Maharashtra farmers’ march and now the nationwide COVID-19 lockdown-triggered migrant exodus has exposed the stark duality of India – an...
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Build a new economic imagination -Yamini Aiyar and Mekhala Krishnamurthy
-Hindustan Times Move beyond State-market, rural-urban, agri-non agri and welfare-growth binaries. They are linked This has been a difficult three months for India. The policy response to the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) and the lockdown has forced it to confront long-ignored realities about the Indian economy — its fragility, regional and spatial concentration and deep structural inequity. It also made visible sources of precarious resilience. Agriculture and associated supply chains, for instance, held...
More »Hari Sharma, agricultural scientist formerly associated with the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), interviewed by Kunal Shankar (TheWire.in)
-TheWire.in In an interview for The Wire, the former ICRISAT scientist says the damage could have been contained if the government had acted promptly to warnings. The desert locust is a deadly agricultural pest that has been on a feeding spree across North Africa, West Asia and South Asia. Lore and mentions of locust swarms exist in the Mahabharata, the Bible and the Quran. But it has been largely absent from the...
More »Climate Change Brings the Worst Locust Attack in Decades to India -Kabir Agarwal and Shruti Jain
-TheWire.in The attack is a highly irregular one, say experts. Farmers on the field feel that the measures taken were too little and too late. New Delhi/ Jaipur: Large swarms of desert locusts have entered areas in India where they had not been seen since 1993 and have already caused damage to crops in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, parts of Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. The migratory pest has made several incursions into Rajasthan...
More »No relief for the nowhere people -Ravi Srivastava
-The Hindu Policy responses to the migrant crisis reinforce the idea of two Indias Jamalo Makdam, 12, died on April 18 walking back from the chilli fields of Telangana to her home in Chhattisgarh. She and a group of other workers decided to return home on foot, as many migrant workers did, after losing their jobs, incomes and even accommodation following the announcement of a nationwide lockdown. Her journey ended in death,...
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