-Business Standard Many good ideas for agricultural reform should be in the Budget Shoring up the rural economy that has been crippled because of two successive droughts is clearly a major focus of the upcoming Budget. This is imperative also to revive rural demand for goods and services to stimulate overall economic growth. But how Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will seek to achieve this feat is hard to predict, though what he...

-Livemint.com It has repeatedly failed to protect the domestic food security agenda The cabinet’s approval of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) on Wednesday is, on the face of it, a relatively innocuous development. As WTO deals go, this is low-hanging fruit. The agreement is to reduce administrative barriers at ports and customs, reducing transactional costs of international trade and consequently—according to various studies—increasing global gross domestic product...

-Frontline The new crop insurance scheme introduced by the NDA government in an election year does not provide for a comprehensive coverage of all crops, against all forms of damage and at all stages of the crop cycle. IN AN election year, it is but natural that incumbent governments will introduce welfare policies and schemes. But the problem is that distribution of such largesse in a neoliberal dispensation can only be...

-Economic and Political Weekly Agriculture cannot be revived without a different approach to water, soil, crops and research. For the second year in succession, rainfall in the monsoon season has been less than normal. As many as 302 out of the 640 districts in the country have been declared drought-hit and the impact of the drought is the severest in nine major states of south, central and east India. It is striking...

-Livemint.com It’s time to look at the deleterious environmental impact of subsidies so as to attain correct pricing of resources A few days before Delhi’s odd-even rule—a road rationing scheme in which odd- and even-numbered cars were allowed to ply on roads on alternate days—was to be implemented, Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia appeared on a television channel to answer questions on the rule. During the show, Sisodia admitted that the...