-Livemint.com The impact of cash crunch on farmers is likely to have a cascading effect on the broader economy in southern India Bengaluru/ Chennai: P.V. Rajappan, a rice farmer in Kerala’s drought-hit Palakkad district, had been planning to drill a borewell to irrigate his next crop. He thought he would be able to do it this year. Rajappan delivered his entire harvest—10,210kg of paddy—to the state-run Civil Supplies Corporation, popularly known as...

-The Indian Express Demonetisation Politics unfolds as a vast morality play. Its imagination unleashes the state on you, in the name of protecting your own virtue. The so-called demonetisation is a watershed event for India. It signifies the arrival of a new kind of Politics that will redefine the relationship between citizen and state. The scale of this event is so unprecedented that we are struggling to see where all the chips...

-Livemint.com The discourse in the state treats all farmers—small, medium, big, irrigated and rain-fed—as a homogeneous entity, ignoring differences in the severity of their problems Sharad Pawar breached an unwritten rule of Maharashtra Politics. Recently, he spoke about the woes of small farmers, albeit those in the irrigated belt. He regretted that a sugarcane farmer of barely two acres of land is often viewed as a rich farmer and that too, rather...

-Livemint.com Delays in replacing the currency risk prolonging the pain in the $2 trillion economy, where about 98% of consumer payments are made in cash Mumbai: For people expecting respite from the government’s clampdown on cash, here’s a reality check: it probably won’t come soon. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration may need until May 2017 to replenish the stock of now worthless bills, according to Saumitra Chaudhuri, an economist who advised Modi’s predecessor....

-The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy The government’s high profile war on black money has generated mixed responses. However, both supporters and opponents of the 2016 demonetisation agree that the move has caused immense hardship to people, especially those outside the banking system and without alternative means to access goods and services in a largely cash economy. Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, discusses the conceptual, practical,...