-News18.com The first part of the report calls out the Modi government for reneging on key promises made to farmers ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. New Delhi: Ahead of the Union Budget 2018-19, the Yogendra Yadav-led Swaraj Abhiyan on Tuesday released a 31-page report titled ‘Kisan Green Paper 2018’. The subtitle of the report reads ‘4 years, 4 budgets: What has this Central Government delivered? The report slams the...
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Will FM Arun Jaitley give a rural touch to Budget 2018 or will he hold on to fiscal prudence? -Shantanu Nandan Sharma
-The Economic Times After Gujarat returned the ruling BJP with a slim margin, the chorus of the establishment was "jo jeeta wohi sikandar" (He who wins is the king). It seemed apt, considering that the party retained Prime Minister Narendra Modi's home state, bunking anti-incumbency of 22 years. But opposition wags responded with "jo sikha wohi sikandar", he who learns will be king, in 2019, in the next general elections. Rural Gujarat,...
More »How government can double farmer incomes
-Livemint.com Farmers need structural reforms, crop diversification and greater public investment rather than subsidies and price support Indian agriculture has been relatively untouched by the structural reforms that lifted incomes in other parts of the economy. Low farm productivity meant that governments tried to improve the lot of farmers through price policy. The problem is that engineering a shift in the terms of trade through higher support prices usually leads to generalized...
More »Potato portents -Ajay Vir Jakhar
-The Indian Express The crisis in the crop’s prices in two of the four years of the Modi government illustrate that farmers no longer matter to it. Farmers are habitually great raconteurs. My grandfather would often narrate an episode, when he encountered a farmer sitting by a heap of potatoes in the middle of the night. On investigating what compelled the farmer to guard potatoes when there were no buyers, he was...
More »Rural wage growth is faltering again -Manas Chakravarty
-Livemint.com There cannot be a solution to the problem of low wage growth in rural India unless opportunities for getting decent and productive jobs are available outside agriculture One of the anomalies that stood out from the broad narrative of rural distress was the stubborn fact that rural wages were growing, not just in nominal but also in real, or inflation-adjusted terms. And if real rural wages were seeing higher growth, surely...
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