-Press release by NREGA Sangharsh Morcha dated 1 April, 2018 Hours after NREGA Sangharsh Morcha wrote an open letter (please click here to access) to the Rural Development Minister demanding notification of revised MGNREGA wage rates for 2018-19, the Ministry issued the employment guarantee act wage rates for the new financial year.   Wage rates have not increased for some of the poorest states of the country – Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar...

-TheWire.in The finance minister has made a big announcement on minimum support price, but he should make it clear whether all he is promising is to take the prices back to the UPA-II levels. The government has done it again. Like last year, there has been much hype about a pro-farmer Budget, but in actuality it rests on misleading claims which don’t address the farming crisis. Last year, the agriculture credit target...

-TheWire.in In a green paper, organisations have pointed out how a number of promises made to farmers have not been kept. New Delhi: Terming the Narendra Modi government as the “most anti-farmer government in the history of independent India” for reneging on its “core” promise of revising minimum support prices (MSP), a ‘green paper’ on agriculture says the Bharatiya Janata Party’s pledge to “double farm incomes by 2022” remains a distant dream. “The...

-The Financial Express Not very long ago—indeed, in July this year—the government had insisted that MGNREGA, as per the findings of independent studies, had helped reduce seasonal migration. To a question on what the government was doing to stop distress migration, the junior minister for rural development, Ram Kripal Yadav, had told the Rajya Sabha that the government has increased the number of guaranteed days of work under the rural jobs...

-The Hindu Business Line The dilution of government intervention in the form of minimum support prices, procurement and public distribution is undermining agricultural production in the country Farmer movements and farm loan waivers in different States have driven home the fact that the viability of agriculture is under challenge. This is surprising, since the comprehensive framework for reviving agricultural production, introduced in response to the agricultural crisis in mid-1960s, is in principle...