-The Business Standard   Among the many initiatives and innovations being considered to improve returns to farming, the creation of producers’ companies deserves closer policy attention than has been the case so far. A farmers’ company, registered as a corporate entity with the registrar of companies, under the Companies Act, can help farm producers come together and derive economies of scope and scale. A group of farmers in Andhra Pradesh has reportedly...

If Rajiv Gandhi were alive, he would have been delighted to see his view on leakages confirmed by a research study on the public distribution system [How Can Food Subsidies Work Better? Answers from India and the Philippines by Shikha Jha and Bharat Ramaswami (http://www.adb.org/documents/working-papers/2010/economics-wp221.pdf)]. The ADB study showed that the deserving poor in India received only 10 per cent of the benefits from the system. Nearly twice accrues to...

From next year, atta,bread,biscuits ,snacks and everything made from maida and sooji will become seriously more expensive. Even after a bumper crop, there just won't be enoughwheat for us. ET helps you join the dots. The trigger for wheat inflation that will hit each one of us is the Food Security Act, which kickstarts next year. The Food Corporation of India (FCI) will need substantially more wheat to supply three...

Flat yields for five years and rising insecticide use are jeopardising the success of Bt cotton technology Cotton has been the biggest success story in Indian agriculture since the Green Revolution. In a country struggling with stagnant yields in most crops, cotton has been the one bright spot. Production has soared from 13.6 million bales (each bale is 170 kg) in 2002-03 to 31.2 million bales in 2010-11—a figure that catapulted...

The communal violence bill prepared by the National Advisory Council (NAC) seeks fundamentally to change how the government deals with violence against minorities. The bill focuses on religious and linguistic minorities as well the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, but religious minorities are at its heart. The bill has some undeniable strengths, but it suffers from two analytically fatal flaws. First, it places excessive faith in the state machinery. Though...