-The Indian Express UP’s farm loan waiver could prompt other states to follow suit, evade real reasons for agricultural distress The new Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath, has hit the ground running. In his first cabinet meeting, he took three important decisions with regard to farmers. First, he waived farm loans of more than Rs 36,000 crore, primarily of the small and marginal farmers who comprise 92 per cent of the...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: Reserve Bank of India governor Urjit Patel has sounded the alarm on state governments waiving farm loans and has called for a consensus on eschewing them to avoid damaging the national balance sheet. Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Aditya Nath recently announced a Rs 36,000-crore farm loan waiver, which could trigger copycat decisions by the punjab and Maharashtra governments. "It undermines honest credit culture, it impacts credit...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Rahul Gandhi today asked the BJP "not to play politics with farmers" by waiving loans in Uttar Pradesh alone as agrarian distress was a national crisis and the Centre should come up with a "national" response. Although Rahul described the Uttar Pradesh government's decision as a "step in the right direction", he alleged inaction by the Narendra Modi government by tweeting: "I am happy the BJP has finally...

Promises are made to be broken. In its 2014 Lok Sabha election manifesto, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made the promise that if it is elected to the Centre, it will then accord a high priority to job creation and opportunities for entrepreneurship, among other things. But latest data on unemployment shared by the BJP MP Shri Bandaru Dattatreya in written form while replying to an unstarred question in the...

-The Hindu Business Line The Government should honour its MSP promise and lift trade curbs The Government move to impose an import duty of 10 per cent on wheat and tur is a timely one. With a bumper harvest likely in wheat this year, market prices have dropped below MSP. Apart from estimates of higher arrivals in mandis, higher imports in recent months too have hit prices. In January alone, 1.13 million...