-The Indian Express The budget is an opportunity for government to address the simmering discontent and disillusion in rural India. The first advance estimates of GDP growth, at 2011-12 constant prices, put the growth for FY16 at 7.6 per cent over the previous year. This is the highest growth rate in the first four years of the forgotten 12th Five-Year Plan. No wonder this makes the Narendra Modi-led NDA government somewhat...
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Rural households have higher debt than urban counterparts: NSSO report -Jitendra
-Down to Earth The debt in rural households is higher, even though their total assets are lesser than urban households A new survey by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) shows that rural households have higher debts than their urban counterparts. At the same time, an urban household owns more than double the asset than that of a rural household. A rural household, on an average, owned assets of Rs 10...
More »Marathwada: 89 farmers commit suicide in January, Task Force says ‘collective failure’ of officials -Manoj Dattatrye More
-The Indian Express Over 1,100 farmers had committed suicide in eight districts of Marathwada in 2015. Pune: The “all-out” efforts — as repeatedly being claimed by the Devendra Fadnavis-led Maharashtra Government — to reduce the constantly rising suicide rates of distressed farmers in Marathwada seem to be yielding little results. The rate of suicides in Marathwada just does not seem to slow down. In the first month of this year, as...
More »The invisible drought -Harsh Mander
-The Indian Express We have turned our back to the intense food and drinking water distress across states India has transformed spectacularly in innumerable ways in the last two decades. One of the least noted changes is in the way the country — governments, the press and people — respond to drought and food scarcities. Back in the late-1980s, many states across India were reeling under back-to-back droughts for three consecutive years, not...
More »End of crop loan subsidy likely to heighten defaults, banks say -Namrata Acharya
-Business Standard But RBI data suggest that by replacing interest subsidy with crop insurance, government can use about Rs 12,500 cr to facilitate crop insurance scheme If a recent recommendation of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on crop loan subsidy is approved by the government, agricultural loans are set to become as costly as home loans or car loans. RBI has suggested interest subvention on crop loans should be phased out,...
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