Breakthroughs in the production and productivity of wheat and rice in the sixties and of cotton recently have been much appreciated, but similar advances in maize have gone largely unnoticed and unsung. Maize output has soared in the past 10 years from a mere 12 million tonnes in 2000-01 to over 21 million tonnes in 2010-11. This increase can largely be attributed to a surge in crop productivity rather than...
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Food subsidy bill shoots up by a whopping of Rs 34,738 cr by Prabha Jagannathan
The Centre's food subsidy bill, incurred mainly on account of reimbursemnet of economic costs to theFood Corporation of India for grain procurement, holding and transportation, has shot up by a whopping Rs 34,738 crore compared to the budgetary allocation for 2011-12. This is mainly due to government buys of a record foodgrain crop in the 2010-11 agricultural year (july-june).The original subsidy for the year was estimated at Rs 47,239.8 crore....
More »Animal experts at UN-backed conference are ‘concerned’ about trade in animals and skins
-The United Nations Animal experts from 50 countries meeting at a United Nations-backed conference today expressed concern about the sustainability of current levels of trade in snake skins used in luxury products and another 20 animal species used in biomedical research, the food industry or as pets. More than 200 scientists conferring in the 25th meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) animal...
More »Challenging the poverty dimension of inflation by Madan Sabnavis
A perverse, yet novel reason put forward to explain high inflation is that the poor are eating more as they are becoming less poor. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has been extolled for being responsible for higher consumption, which in a way is a vindication of high inflation. The extended logic used here is that if the poor are eating more and we are paying high...
More »The plunder economy by Ashok Mitra
One lives to learn — or unlearn. The working head of what passes for this country’s Planning Commission is unambiguous about it. One important measure to fight inflation, he believes, is to raise prices. That is to say, to stop prices from rising, you must first raise prices. The gentleman has heartily endorsed the recent serial increases in the prices of petroleum products since such increases will, in his view,...
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