-The Economic Times The world is no stranger to farm debt crises like the one India is seeing today. Back in the 1980s, the Canadian parliament enacted a law to stop foreclosures on farm debt, after prices collapsed and interest rates jumped to as high as 24%. The law was in force for a dozen-odd years. It identified insolvent farmers, facilitated agreements between the borrowers and lenders, and helped some farmers move...

-TheWire.in The government has to evolve policies suitable to a particular state and fine-tune them according to local needs. ‘Nothing succeeds like success,’ first written by Sir Arthur Helps in Realmah in 1868, is going to guide political parties while they draft manifestos for the next parliamentary election. It seems that the Rythu Bandhu (RB) scheme – also known as the Telangana model of direct investment support (DIS) to farmers – has...

-The Indian Express Insecurity, more than poverty or indebtedness, is the key economic issue that politicians must address If social inequality is the most acutely felt social problem in India, insecurity, more than poverty, is the most acutely felt economic problem. While most measures suggest that only around one-fifth of the population today is under the official poverty line, large sections of those even much above that line are subject to...

-Livemint.com Reeling under intense dry spell, state recorded 49% rain?deficit, says regional?disaster monitoring centre Bengaluru: The Karnataka government on Wednesday declared 156 out of the 176 talukas of the state drought hit in the wake of a failed northeast monsoon. This has added to the growing call for the speedy implementation of the farm loan waiver to mitigate the deepening agrarian distress. The declaration comes months after several districts of the state...

-Business Standard Those who want to help India's farmers should be working much harder to figure out what they really need It’s election season in India and the money is flowing. Governments in many states have begun waiving tens of millions of dollars’ worth of loans to poor farmers in an effort to buy their loyalty. The argument – widely accepted by politicians and journalists, the demographic groups with the least fiscal...