-The Indian Express The four-month monsoon season ended last week leaving a deficit of 12 per cent. The authorities have called it a below-normal monsoon and the worst in the past five years, but skim the data and the picture seems even more sobering. Nearly one-third of the 36 met divisions in the country have received deficient rainfall, with Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh - which are major agriculture regions -...
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How to improve the welfare state -Ajay Chhibber
-The Business Standard Make schemes mobile and portable, by focusing on people and not products India spends close to four per cent of its GDP on an alphabet soup of welfare schemes and subsidies - it has become a welfare state before becoming a developed state. Despite its significant costs, India's welfare system is neither comprehensive nor very effective - subject to huge leakages and corruption, and not well knit into...
More »Bengal's women learn to extract good food from dry land -Ajitha Menon
-Women's Feature Service Tribal families in Bankura, West Bengal, living on a stable diet of potato and rice and occasionally some 'daal' (lentils), are now consuming a variety of vegetables, cereals, fruits and animal protein with relish on a daily basis, marking a sea change in the nutrition parametres in one of the most backward districts of India. The credit for this dramatic transformation goes to the dry land sustainable integrated farming...
More »Ashok Gulati, former chairman of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices, and at present chair professor agriculture, the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, speaks with Sandip Das
-The Financial Express From allocating extra foodgrains to states as a means to fight the price rise to setting up a high-level committee to recommend measures for restructuring the Food Corporation of India (FCI), the government has taken various steps for cutting down food subsidy and curbing further spike in agricultural commodity prices. From allocating extra foodgrains to states as a means to fight the price rise to setting up a high-level...
More »Inflation: Three reasons why rising food prices could be here to stay -M Rajshekhar
-The Economic Times None of the standard explanations quite explain the rise in food prices India has seen: pronounced since 2006 and alarming after 2010. Drought and poor rains? The country has seen good aggregate rainfall in most of those years. Spike in global prices? Those were high in 2007-08, not now. Fragmented value chains that allow middlemen to grab large margins? The value chain has always been fragmented. Growth has slowed...
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