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...

-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...

-Article-14.com Instead of expensive, lawful compensation, about 10 states now offer farmers, landowners a shiny barter deal: Hand over your land, get a smaller plot when the area is ‘developed’. In Punjab, we investigate how developers get cheap land and owners wait years. Mohali: In 2010, vegetable vendor Surjeet Singh handed over the nine-acre farm he and his family owned to the Punjab government’s Greater Mohali Area Development Authority, which hoped to...

-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...

-Down to Earth blog The distress among small farmers in India is market-driven to a large extent in both ways — too much protection (minimum support price) or too little. The question of future of Indian agriculture has been around for some time now since the agrarian distress and crisis in the sector. It has become important in the context of the spate of recent reforms that include permitting private wholesale markets,...