If the price rise is due to production shortfall, how does one explain the near doubling of the price within a few days? The sharply rising onion prices have raised the suspicion that speculators are manipulating a shortage situation. First, a few facts. In retail markets, onion prices have soared from Rs 10-11 per kg in June to as high as Rs 70-80 on Dec 21. Even more significantly, prices zoomed by...
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Money for nothing. And misery for free by Rohini Mohan
IT WAS a windfall five years ago that taught Panchali Satyavva the power of a lie. It happened one Monday afternoon in Someshwar village of Nizamabad district in Andhra Pradesh. It was raining in sheets and she had just placed a bucket under the steady trickle of water from the roof of her hut. Two men were at her door, holding umbrellas and offering her an unsolicited Rs. 5,000. They...
More »A yawning gap by Sanjeeb Mukherjee
From the time a farmer in India harvests his produce to the time it lands on your plate, farm products go through several layers of middlemen, wholesalers, cold chains and other intermediaries, which push its price up by many notches. The end result: growers get paid less and consumers pay more. The stranglehold that the government has over agriculture produce marketing in India has given rise to abject inefficiencies, lack...
More »‘Kerala should promote Organic cultivation’
Union minister of state for Agriculture, K V Thomas, today said Kerala, which had not fully utilised the allocation of Rs 700 crore under the Vidharba package, should utilise the remaning nearly rs 400 crore for Organic cultivation.About rs 400 crore was yet to be utilised and this could be made use for propagating organic cultivation in the the state, thomas said at the sidelines of a function here.The miniser...
More »Rural Poverty Report 2011
South Asia in general and India in particular have the dubious distinction of standing out for wrong reasons every time a new global poverty report is released. We not only have the largest number of underweight children, a very high maternal mortality rate and the world’s highest number of out of school children but we also top the global malnutrition chart. (See links below for more details) However the 2011 United...
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