-The Hindu Amidst the scattered experimentation now, the Centre must offer strategic policy guidance for inter-State coordination Only two years ago, in the wake of a nationwide lockdown, India was left shocked by the plight of migrant workers walking hundreds of kilometres, facing hunger, exhaustion and violence, to get to the safety of their home villages. The dire circumstances of the migrants tugged at our collective heartstrings. They became the focus of...

In the absence of income or expenditure-based headcount ratio, the growth in the real wages (i.e., nominal wages adjusted against retail inflation) of the manual workers is considered to be a good proxy to assess the trends in poverty. This is because the manual, unskilled/ semi-skilled labourers exist at the bottom of the pyramid or economic hierarchy, and most of them belong to the social categories Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...

-Newsclick.in The roots of the present crisis lie in wrong policies adopted over the last two decades that have undermined domestic production of fertilisers led by the public sector and increased dependence on imports and production by the private sector. Indian farmers have been facing a major crisis because of shortages in availability and an unprecedented rise in prices of fertilisers. Fertilisers are a critical input for agriculture, and a shortage in...

-The Hindu Dependence on private sector is on the rise, they say Channai: Farmers supplying milk to the Tamil Nadu Cooperative Milk Producers Federation (Aavin) have urged the State government to increase procurement prices. Citing the example of another cooperative, Amul, which has recently hiked selling price of milk by ₹2 per litre, M.G. Rajendran of the Tamil Nadu Milk Producers Welfare Association said farmers in Gujarat, where Amul is based out of,...

-Down to Earth Post mechanisation, for the first time there is innovation in farm equipment to revive bullocks and aid small farmers Simhachalam calls himself a ‘bullock entrepreneur’. Each agricultural season, this farmer from Andhra Pradesh’s Sangra village travels with his pair of bullocks to work on other people’s farms in nearby villages for a fee. Like most other parts of the country, bullocks in these tribal villages are traditionally used only for...