-The Hindu More than 16,000 machines from private manufacturers yet to be installed: Health Ministry data More than a year after the PM CARES fund announced it would buy and distribute 50,000 ventilators for ₹2,000 crore, only ₹1,532 crore has been released, according to a Health Ministry response to a Right to Information request filed by Commodore Lokesh Batra (Retd). The remaining money is awaiting clearance from the fund, said an official. A...
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Minimum Support Prices in India: Distilling the Facts -Prankur Gupta, Reetika Khera, and Sudha Narayanan
--Review of Agrarian Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1, JANUARY-JUNE, 2021 Abstract: In recent years in India, minimum support price (MSP) and Government Procurement, especially of paddy and wheat, have been discussed widely, but these discussions have often drawn on evidence that is dated and incomplete. Consequently, such discussions have clouded the facts, resulting in a large number of factoids. According to these popular misconceptions, very few farmers (6 per cent only) benefit...
More »GST brought down on 14 COVID relief goods -Vikas Dhoot
-The Hindu Council leaves the 5% tax levied on vaccines unchanged. The Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council on Saturday decided to waive the tax levied on two critical drugs against COVID-19 and mucormycosis — tocilizumab and amphotericin B — and reset the tax rate to 5% for 14 major pandemic relief items, till September 30. Non-BJP-ruled States registered a strong dissent, terming the continued imposition of GST on critical COVID supplies and...
More »It’s time to protect the poor and the migrants from rising edible oil prices
In his Mann ki Baat address to the nation on 30th May, 2021, Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi appreciated the fact that the farmers received "more than the minimum support price (MSP) for mustard" pertaining to the rabi production. One can easily guess from this statement of the PM that the mustard growers in Haryana (and elsewhere) preferred to sell their produce to private traders in the open market instead...
More »Odisha’s forest produce gatherers hit hard -Satyasundar Barik
-The Hindu In the pandemic, there aren’t enough buyers and Government Procurement is delayed For the second year running, forest dwellers across Odisha have been deprived of the right price for the Non-Timber Forest Produce (NTFP) gathered by them. With the COVID-19 pandemic disrupting local economies across the country, the NTFP market in Odisha has also suffered due to the absence of adequate buyers this year. “Last year, when the COVID-19 pandemic surfaced, forest...
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