-The Indian Express Falling rates in March stumps industry in month synonymous with high prices. Pune: Since February, Deepak Pawale, who runs a poultry farm at Retavadi village in Khed taluka of Pune district, has been selling 45-day-old birds weighing 2-2.5 kg each at well below his estimated production cost of Rs 70 per kg. “The traders aren’t ready to pay higher rates, as they tell me that their sales have slowed down,”...

-The Indian Express The main problem for farmers today is not production or having sufficient crop to sell. Instead, it has to do with prices that they are getting for their produce. The Met Department has forecast a third-in-a-row “normal” south-west monsoon this year, thanks to the very low probability of an El Nino event — the abnormal warming of the equatorial eastern Pacific Ocean waters, which is known to adversely impact...

-The Indian Express Raising agricultural exports requires the government to unburden policy of consumer bias. A balance should be struck between meeting the needs of food-insecure consumers and income-insecure farmers. The Agriculture Minister, Radha Mohan Singh, recently tweeted about the government’s resolve to increase the value of the country’s agricultural exports to $100 billion by 2022-23. The Dalwai Committee Report on doubling farmers’ incomes also talked of a similar target. It said,...

-The New Indian Express Something remarkable happened when the farmers came marching to Mumbai recently. Instead of greeting them with hostility, Mumbaikars welcomed them with affection, food and water. This change in attitude was triggered by the farmers’ extraordinary discipline and their efforts to ensure minimal disruption to the Mumbaikars’ routines. Even hard-boiled journalists acknowledged, for a brief moment, urbanites had realised  our farmers and adivasis were indeed facing difficult times. The...

-The Indian Express To deal with corruption, it is not enough to just get fiscal policies right. It is in our collective long-term interest to nurture individual values. I went to an optometrist last week, who gave me one of those cards to read where the font starts out large and then gets progressively small, to test your reading capacity. In this case what was interesting was the content of the card....