-TheWire.in While the scheme has laid the foundation, its expansion will, like the GST, require a great deal of political consensus across states. The Narendra Modi government’s interim budget, which was announced in February 2019, brought a bonanza for farmers. Piyush Goyal, who was the finance minister when Arun Jaitley was on medical leave, announced a new scheme called the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-Kisan) under which Rs 6,000 per year...

-Business Standard/ India Spend For the first time since Independence, India saw a shift of surplus labour from Agriculture to the non-agricultural sectors Although income mobility improved country-wide in the seven years to 2012, the progress was unequal between states, while the likelihood of children pursuing the same occupation as their fathers declined for those employed in the low productivity agricultural sector, noted a January 2019 study on economic mobility. Farmers’ children were...

-TheWire.in Scientists have found that, compared to rice, alternative grains experienced smaller declines in yield under climate extremes. However, there is a catch. Alternative grains like millets and sorghum could help India cope better with the impact of global heating on Agriculture and variations in supply than continuing to rely on rice and wheat alone. This is the heartening conclusion of a new study, but it also cautions that the cultivation area...

-Working Paper No. 75, July 2019, Nabakrushna Choudhury Centre for Development Studies, Bhubaneswar This study looks into four broad questions on smallholder Agriculture, that is, the marginal and small farm sizes that constitute more than 85 per cent of the operational holdings in India. Are returns to smallholder Agriculture sustainable? Is the smallholder Agriculture efficient? Does the smallholder have access to formal sources of credit? Is credit provided by formal sources...

-The Hindu Without factoring in Agriculture, the vision of a $5-trillion economy will remain a distant dream India’s dream of becoming a $5-trillion economy by 2024 is now in the open with a ‘blue sky’ vision envisaged in the Economic Survey this year. The document lays down a clear strategy to augment the growth of key sectors by shifting gears as the current economic conditions are smooth in terms of macroeconomic stability...