-The Indian Express Potato is cultivated on almost four lakh acres of land in West Bengal between December and March, with about 10 lakh farmers growing the crop. Hooghly: With West Bengal in the midst of a polarising election season, farmers in the state’s potato belt of Hooghly and parts of Purba Bardhaman say their cries for help are getting drowned out in the din of a high-decibel poll campaign. Potato is cultivated...

-Financial Express While wheat prices may firm up once the official procurement begins in all the producing states, the government will have to implement a robust procurement system for other crops to support the prices fetched by farmers. Mandi prices of most rabi crops ruled below their minimum support prices (MSPs) during the last month, even as more than half of the winter crop has been harvested (see chart). While wheat prices...

-The Indian Express The Central government has fixed the minimum support price (MSP) of wheat at Rs 1975 per quintal, hiking it by Rs 50 from last year’s Rs 1925 per quintal. Chandigarh: Ahead of the wheat procurement that starts from April 10 in the state, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Monday cleared a sum of Rs 21,658.73 crore towards Cash Credit Limit (CCL) up to end April, 2021 for...

-Frontline.in The argument that the Indian farmer is overburdened by “negative support” has become contentious in the context of the recent farm laws. In reality, this does not hold up to scrutiny. In the heat of the ongoing protests against the new farm laws, some views have emerged that the state has saddled the Indian farmer with excessive taxes. In support of this contention, methodology and data from the Organisation for Economic...

Quite often it is argued by mainstream economists that a sizeable chunk of the Union Budget every year is wasted because the Government spends that on food and fertiliser subsidies. The burgeoning size of these two subsidies relative to the entire budget as well as the gross domestic product (GDP) is often used to build the argument that economic as well as environmental sustainability of the country is at stake...