-The Business Standard   Agriculture ministry wants review of clamps on holdings; rural development ministry seeks centralisation of records With Narendra Modi set to take over as prime minister in the next few days, the department of agriculture is proposing a comprehensive review of land ceiling laws as a first major reform in the sector.   Land also figures in the to-do list of the rural development ministry. It has proposed centralisation of land records...

-The Business Standard   Different economists have arrived at varying figures to assess the state's Agricultural Growth. The author tries to understand the rationale behind these conflicting numbers As Narendra Modi, having led the government in Gujarat for 13 years, heads to New Delhi to try and replicate what is called the Gujarat model on a national level, the country's leading agriculture economists are engaged in a fascinating debate over the agriculture growth...

-The Indian Express   Debate on the Gujarat model is more about stated positions, less about reality. Having done economic modelling all my life, as a student at the University of Pennsylvania, which boasted of the Wharton model and Lawrence Klein, and later, in the days when planning still mattered, while heading the modelling division of the Planning Commission, I find it bewildering that Gujarat's substantial real achievements and equally real problems are...

-The Indian Express   Available data suggests the programme has been effective in reducing rural poverty and gender discrimination Nirmala Sitharaman's misinformation (‘How not to run a programme', IE, May 9) on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which employs one in every four Indian rural households every year, is disappointing. Consider these facts. For the first time in over two decades, the increase in rural consumption (a proxy indicator...

-The Indian Express   The Gujarat model continues to generate more heat than light. This is in response to Professor Yoginder K. Alagh's article, ‘Posture-nomics' (IE, May 7), wherein he says, "Getting back to agriculture, the 10 per cent growth rate figure was the result of a paid-for study commissioned by the government of Gujarat and conducted by the International Food Policy Research Institute, to which [Ashok] Gulati was affiliated. The finding was...