India has large wheat stocks already yet policy dictates they increase. In states like Punjab, Haryana, UP and Gujarat prices have fallen and are below the minimum support prices. This is a policy-induced outcome. A safe game in grains is fine, given the global politics of grain trade and the great ability of Indian politics to subsidise the wrong man in the vote bank — but how safe is safe? The...

-The Business Standard   Only anecdotal evidence has been available so far to back the assertion that there has been a sharp rise in agricultural wages. Now, field data bear out the trend. Collected by the Shimla-based Labour Bureau, these numbers show a roughly 50 per cent cumulative rise in rural labour wages in the past two years. The increase in Andhra Pradesh has been assessed at over 40 per cent...

Food-price inflation in India, Asia’s third-largest economy, may accelerate in the second half as farmers are paying 20 percent more to grow crops, according to the commission that helps set minimum farm-product prices. “The cost of production is going up very fast,” Ashok Gulati, chairman of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices, said in a telephone interview yesterday. “The labor cost has gone up dramatically in the past one year...

What is rural and what is urban is largely an artefact of definition and relative. See the table below. Most of India's 'rural' population resides in villages that contain between 500 and 5,000 inhabitants. Some argue that in other countries, many of these villages would be classified as urban. These studies point out that if India were to be a little more liberal in its definition of urban areas (minimum...

A Working Group (WG) set up by the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) has drafted a detailed note on land acquisition and relief and rehabilitation which seeks not only to go beyond the pending government bills on the subject, but recommends that the two be merged into a single National Development, Acquisition, Displacement and Rehabilitation Act. Interestingly, it rejects the Haryana model that Congress leaders only too often hold up...