-Scroll.in JNU professor Himanshu says the economic slowdown is not the result of a one-off event like demonetisation, the slump began almost two years ago. The economy is in a trough. The first quarter of 2017-2018 saw the growth of gross domestic product (the total value of all goods and services produced in a country in a year) drop to 5.7% from 7.9% in the corresponding period last year – the...

For those who asked why the farmers of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and other states hit the streets during June and July this year, the report prepared by the Committee on Doubling Farmers’ Income could be a ready reckoner. Prepared under the chairpersonship of Ashok Dalwai, the report on Doubling Farmers’ Income after studying the trends in crop income and cost associated with 23 crops, reveals a mixed picture across the...

-The Hindu Business Line At an organic market in Odisha, middle-class consumers get to interact with the producers of their food and appreciate traditional knowledge systems One Sunday morning in January, I visited an organic produce market located amidst dense bougainvillea creepers and rows of trees, on the grounds of the six-decade-old Christian Hospital in Bissamcuttack, a town in western Odisha’s Rayagada district. In policy and public imagination, Odisha, particularly its western districts...

-The Hindu Fifty years since the Green Revolution, the architect of the reform highlights the crisis facing Indian agriculture today It is 11 years since agronomist M.S. Swaminathan handed over his recommendations for improving the state of agriculture in India to the former United Progressive Alliance government, at the height of the Vidarbha farmer suicides crisis, but they are still to be implemented. To address the agrarian crisis and farmers’ unrest across...

-Newsclick.in Forget 50 percent profit over the cost of production, the farmers were forced to sell their produce at well below the minimum support price and the cost of production, pushing them deeper into debt. Farming turning increasingly unviable across vast swathes of India, and the Narendra Modi-led government not delivering on the BJP’s election promise to “make agriculture rewarding” lie behind the massive protests that have rocked several BJP-ruled states in...