-The Hindu The fact that food companies prosper but farmers commit suicide shows that profits are in the market, not the farm. It is time to replicate the Amul story many times over In the ongoing debates on the new land acquisition bill, the potential of agribusiness to address agrarian distress has not been explored. There are several domestic agriculture companies, both listed and private, that are doing extremely well amidst an...
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Digitization of ration cards in 26 states to plug PDS leakage -Dipak K Dash
-The Times of India NEW DELHI: In significant progress made by states to check leakage of foodgrains under the public distribution system (PDS), 26 states and Union Territories have completed 100% digitization of ration cards in the past one year. Six states have digitized the supply chain for better monitoring of grain moving from godowns to the doorstep of consumers. According to food ministry sources, the overall digitization of ration cards across...
More »Free power, the bane of farming in Punjab -Arvinder Walia & Jasmine Sharma
-The Hindu Business Line No crop diversification efforts will work so long as free electricity offsets the costs of pumping out groundwater Subsidies have for long been a necessary evil, a vote-bank silver bullet. But its relevance stands challenged in today’s increasingly market-oriented economic order. The recent US declaration of giving differential treatment to developing countries, with regard to farm subsidies, brings up the long standing issue of slashing subsidies that have...
More »A Bank Account for Mary -Jayshree Venkatesan
-The Hindu The PMJDY celebrates success on its website, but thousands of Marys remain outside the banking system. This won’t change unless the scheme alters both design and implementation A few months ago, when the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) was still being spoken of as a success for the largest number of accounts opened in a day, earning the government a Guinness world record, I visited the branch of a...
More »The slaughter of suicide data -P Sainath
-Frontline Changing the way you count changes the count. THE total number of farmer suicides in the country since 1995 crossed the 3,00,000-mark in 2014. However, the 2014 data are not comparable with 19 earlier years of farm suicide data. This is because of major changes in the methodology of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). With the new parameters, the number of farmer suicides in 2014 falls to 5,650. That is...
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