-TheIndiaForum.in The crises of Punjab’s agriculture are rooted in the same history that made it the granary of India. Ensuring sustainability for farmers and the farm sector requires an engagement with the shifting trajectories of agriculture over the last seven decades. Despite Punjab’s meagre size, the region has remained an important constituent in the self-imagination of the Indian nation. The imprints of Punjab’s agrarian economy and culture have continued to expand in...

-The Hindu/ PTI Nearly 96% of the people surveyed under a food rights campaign in Maharashtra faced a drop in their earnings during the novel coronavirus-induced lockdown last year, a social body claims. Mumbai: Job losses and non-availability of casual work were the key reasons for this, and every fifth respondent was forced to go hungry because of no money to buy food, Mukta Srivastava, the State’s convener for the Anna Adhikar...

-The Hindu To show Indian agriculture as being net taxed to argue for the farm laws has poor conceptual validity Over the past three decades, a major rationale offered in favour of liberalising Indian agriculture was that farmers were “net taxed”. In other words, incomes of farmers were kept artificially lower than what they should have been. It was argued that this “net taxation” existed because protectionist policies deprived farmers of higher...

-The Indian Express Somanathan said the government is trying to reach the target group of unskilled and semi-skilled workers through increased government expenditure in the construction sector. Working with a “constrained resource envelope” in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic ahead of Budget 2021-22, the government essentially had to make a choice between two policy options: handouts and capital expenditure. “We chose capex,” TV Somanathan, Expenditure Secretary, Ministry of Finance, told The...

-IdeasforIndia.in Commenting on the strong infrastructure push in the 2021-22 Budget, Sarmistha Pal argues that an emphasis on investment in infrastructure may not necessarily bring India out of the current economic recession – with the Budget’s negligence of the education sector and insufficient health expenditure, making matters worse. The 2021-22 Union Budget, announced on 1 February 2021, made a definitive turn to the right as it turned its back on providing any...