-The Economic Times With the general election a few months away, the central government has begun crunching the numbers in preparation for a comprehensive programme to help farmers tide over challenges posed by a dip in prices and dwindling incomes. The government is keen on a more substantive intervention than a loan waiver at the central level to alleviate agrarian distress besides stepping up investments in the sector, having concluded that writing...
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Lifelines beyond farm loan waivers -Kirankumar Vissa
-The Hindu In addition to reforming the credit system, agriculture should be made profitable Rural agrarian distress is firmly at the centre of the national discourse today, triggered by the recent Assembly election results in the Hindi heartland as well as continuous farmer agitations in the past two years (picture). Just a month ago, the farmers’ march in Delhi highlighted the reality of their deprivation, anger and resolve. Quite remarkably, their presence...
More »A double-edge sword for farmers -- Loan waivers shrink credit supply to the farm sector -Kushankur Dey
-Financial Express Farm loan waivers—of more than Rs 850 billion in FY18 and FY19, announced by various state governments—are the flavour of the season. This can affect credit offtake and induce further stress for banks and amount to another agrarian crisis. Farm sector NPAs accounted for 16% of banks’ advances under the priority sector lending in October 2018. Post the early waiver-announcements, credit growth in agriculture and allied activities has been...
More »An attempt to understand and contextualise farmer suicides -MS Sriram
-Livemint.com Some perspectives on the issue seem to paper over the problem and get into comparisons There is much discourse on both the issue of agrarian distress and farmer suicides. However, there have been some arguments that seem to paper over the problem and get into comparisons—that the people who committed suicide just happened to be farmers; that they were not poor; that (as argued by Shamika Ravi of Brookings India) the...
More »Telangana is Proof Farm Loan Waivers Aren't a Long-Term Solution -Siraj Hussain
-TheWire.in The government has to evolve policies suitable to a particular state and fine-tune them according to local needs. ‘Nothing succeeds like success,’ first written by Sir Arthur Helps in Realmah in 1868, is going to guide political parties while they draft manifestos for the next parliamentary election. It seems that the Rythu Bandhu (RB) scheme – also known as the Telangana model of direct investment support (DIS) to farmers – has...
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