-The Financial Express The minimum that the govt can do is to remove all restrictions on a free market for pulses Last year, roughly at this time, the price of tur dal (pigeon pea) in the retail market was hovering around R180/kg. Prices of other pulses were not far behind. They were all spiraling up due to back-to-back droughts during 2014-15 and 2015-16. Production of all pulses had plunged to 16.5 million...

-The Hindu In stark contrast to worldwide trends, women in India are being forced out of the workforce According to a recent report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), India and Pakistan have the lowest rates of women’s labour force participation in Asia, in sharp contrast to Nepal, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia that have the highest, with richer nations like Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia falling in between. Moreover, even this low rate...

-Economic and Political Weekly Shantanu De Roy (shantanudr2004@gmail.com) teaches at the Department of Policy Studies, TERI University, New Delhi. It was argued that economic liberalisation would ensure a favourable shift in the terms of trade for agriculture in India, enabling producers to plough back surplus from cultivation to make long-term improvements on land, and raise agricultural productivity and growth rate. Contrary to expectations, there was no noticeable improvement in the terms of...

-The Financial Express Given the likely 22 million tonne production of pulses this year, up more than a third compared to last year, it is not surprising prices have crashed. In the case of tur, for instance, retail prices are down from R118 per kg in Delhi on October 1, 2016 to R89 on March 1. As a result of the surge in pulses inflation last year, rabi sowing increased by...

-TheCitizen.in NEW DELHI: Perhaps no other public policy debate in post-independence India has seen as much of an “inversion of reason” on the part of the government as the demonetization debate. When critics were pointing, on the basis of government statistics themselves, to the palpable failure of the demonetization measure to achieve its purported objective, which was to cripple the black economy, the government kept harping, in its justification, on the extraordinary...