-Firstpost.com Ludhiana: North India’s smog problem — a cause of much tension between states — seems to have left politicians, farmers and even experts stumped. In Punjab, the government’s measures to tackle stubble-burning have reaped little dividend, as the farmers, many of them debt-ridden, say that at the end of the harvesting season, they are still left with no option but to set paddy straw on fire in order to clear their...

-National Herald Maitreesh Ghatak, Professor of Economics at London School of Economics, in an interview to Tathagata Bhattacharya says the government has failed on many counts At the end of the day, it is growth and employment generation via new investment that is key to long-term economic progress. Various welfare schemes are a way of providing a social safety net to the poor in the short-run. It is performance along these two...

-TheWire.in Mexican economist David Barkin on India's neoliberal economics, growing inequalities, agrarian distress and more. David Barkin is Professor of Economics at the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City. He received his doctorate in economics from Yale University and was awarded the National Prize in Political Economics in 1979 for his analysis of inflation in Mexico. His research has focused on the development of an alternative to the capitalist economic model. In an...

-Livemint.com The best way to double the real incomes of Indian farmers would be to halve their numbers through job creation in other parts of the economy The Narendra Modi government last week announced sharp increases in minimum support prices (MSPs) for a variety of farm products. The move itself is not unexpected. The first sign that the Modi government would shift away from its earlier strategy of minimal hikes to douse...

-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....