-Down to Earth The price of cereal, paddy and oilseed has crashed in more than 1,700 markets, according to government data On a vast farmland in Kalajhar mandi of Sangrur district, Punjab, farmers are waiting to negotiate with traders who have rejected their paddy crop infected due to humidity. Chand Singh, 70, a farmer who owns 4 hectares of farmland in Kalajhar village, says traders rejected 20 tonnes of paddy that he cultivated...

-Networkideas.org In recent times, the clamour for formalising economic activity, or shrinking its unorganised component and expanding the organised, has been heard from diverse sources. There are those who want formalisation to occur because the unorganised sector is seen as being largely outside the direct and indirect tax net, depriving the government of much needed resources. Hence, for example, one feature seen as favouring the Goods and Services Tax regime is...

-Livemint.com Loan waivers and electricity subsidies are band-aids at best; a deeper transformation is needed The past few days have neatly summed up the scale and nature of the challenges facing India’s agriculture sector. First, the provisional agriculture census 2015-16 showed that landholdings have continued their decades-long trend of fragmentation, leading to a further rise in the proportion of small and marginal farmers. Then, 30,000 farmers, who had started their march from...

-Mongabay.com * Chhattisgarh has a strong mineral base, forests and a large tribal population. As a result there are many conflicts over land use and access to natural resources. * The Forest Rights Act 2006 has given legal space for tribal communities to access their resources. Chhattisgarh has achieved good numbers in the implementation of individual and forest rights. * However, there are problems in the qualitative implementation of the rights and these...

-ILO News Despite real wage growth, inequality, informality and gender wage gap persist. New Delhi: While India’s economy in the past two decades has seen an annual average GDP rate of 7 % — low pay and inequality persist according to the India Wage Report: Wage policies for decent work and inclusive growth , published by the International Labour Organization. The NSSO estimates also indicate that the real average daily wage has doubled...