A working group on NREGA asks for indexing wages to the farm wage index, besides reducing work hours. Justice often comes with a price. If workers of the country's only largescale wage employment programme are to be ensured a decent minimum wage for 100 days every year, it is sure to make many others wince. For, low wages mean more production, cheaper stuff, and so on. The supporters of low wages also...

Various ways and means of checking irregularities in the implementation of rural employment guarantee scheme have been discussed. One suggestion is that workers employed under this scheme ought to be organised. The first step in this direction was the formation of National Rural Employment Guarantee Workers' Union - Gujarat (NREGWUG), which was followed by other similar efforts in Rajasthan, parts of Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere. Paulomee Mistry , general secretary...

Uttarakhand is likely to pass the much-awaited Agriculture Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) Act, setting the stage for private companies like RIL and ITC to get into contract farming in the state and set up private mandis. Uttarakhand agriculture minister, Trivendra Singh Rawat on Friday said chief minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank has agreed to give the final nod to the proposal at the next Cabinet meeting. The move follows the green...

Both sides will have to rise above politics and focus on the water crisis, which requires difficult and bitter solutions.  As the long hot summer sizzles, one's thoughts in Lahore and Amritsar turn to water. It is scarce on both sides of the border. When the British finally and fully took over the Punjab in 1849, their thoughts turned to the possibility of engineering for agriculture. In the 1860s, they...

Gujarat's business acumen and entrepreneurial zest is passé; the State's leap-frogging with 11 per cent agricultural growth, praised by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) last year, is old hat too. What is new is this: Gujarat may now export more ‘kesar', the famous mango variety of the State, to West Asia than Maharashtra sells alphonso; the State has entered Goa market with cashew nut; and an Ahmedabad-based part-time...