Against the backdrop of the Finance Minister Shri Piyush Goyal announcing the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PMKSN) programme during his budget speech on 1st February, 2019, it becomes essential to differentiate between 12.56 crore operational holding households (enumerated, as per the Agriculture Census) and 13.33 crore ownership holding households (estimated, as per the 70th round National Sample Survey report no. 571) pertaining to size upto 2 hectares. In his budget...

-Scroll.in This is not just about low job creation but also about the worsening quality of jobs, says Himanshu, associate professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University. On Thursday, a political storm boiled over after Business Standard reported that, between 2017-’18, unemployment numbers in India reached a 45-year high. The newspaper based its report on a survey, conducted by the National Sample Survey Organisation, called the Periodic Labour Force Survey that the government had...

-Livemint.com The government did not visualize there were problems in the way it was designed, the Methodology itself was faulty Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), the flagship programme launched with much fanfare in 2016, has run into rough weather. With both the area covered and the number of enrolled farmers declining, the country’s premium crop insurance scheme is certainly in need of an overhaul. While Parliament’s committee on estimates, chaired by senior...

-Financial Express Trade and World Trade Organisation (WTO) discussions thrive on perception. Recent actions by the US seek to portray India as flouting WTO rules and distorting the global market by providing huge subsidies to cotton. Left unchallenged, the hypocrisy of the US narrative on cotton could sway WTO members, particularly the cotton-producing African countries. So, what is the fracas on India’s cotton subsidies all about? Shorn of legalese, the US has...

Passionate about the deepening of agrarian crisis, quite often journalists and media persons cite figures related to farm suicide (as provided by the National Crime Records Bureau) in order to draw the attention of the readers. They do so in the following ways: * Compare the absolute number of farm suicides (viz. suicide by cultivators + suicide by agricultural labourers) across regions/ states for a particular time point or time period...