-Financial Express Farmers in India (also in undivided India) have generally been poor, and it has not been only the phenomenon of post-reforms period in Independent India, as believed by some. Yes, now it is becoming worse day by day. Farmers’ distress over the past few years has taken a new dimension so much so that political parties, without exception, are now using it as an opportunity to win elections by...

-The Indian Express To address farmers' woes, we need a multi-pronged strategy of income support, government investment, and institutional innovations, and not a one-size-fits-all approach. The two main policy interventions repeatedly discussed in recent months to tackle farmer distress — loan waivers and minimum support prices (MSP) — treat all farmers (large/small, male/female) alike. But farmers are heterogeneous. They differ especially by income, land owned and gender. And farmer dissatisfaction is...

-The Indian Express The existing MSP-based procurement system is fiscally unsustainable. The time has come to consider market intelligence-based regulation of crop production Farmers are always in distress when prices of their produce are subdued. The response of governments, obviously prompted by political pressures, has been to sharply hike minimum support prices (MSP) of crops or declare loan waivers. Thus, the current government at the Centre has significantly raised the MSPs of...

-The Indian Express While a focused jobs guarantee thrust could help mitigate financial distress for tens of thousands of rural families, Maharashtra’s performance on MGNREGA until now this year has been lacklustre on several counts. Mumbai: As drought conditions worsen in across large parts of rural Maharashtra and sowing for rabi crops adversely affected, the state is expected to give a fresh push to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee...

  In its 2014 election manifesto, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), among other things, promised to "take steps to enhance the profitability in agriculture, by ensuring a minimum of 50% profits over the cost of production". In his 2018-19 Union budget speech too, the Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley informed the Parliament that the 2014 election manifesto of the BJP had stated that the farmers should get at least 1.5 times the...