-The Hindu Business Line Farmers, reeling under crop losses, feel the Centre’s crop insurance scheme is merely helping insurance firms make profits. Radheshyam Jadhav reports After completing his graduation, Ramkisan Nirmal took up a challenge. Unlike other youths who prefer to migrate to nearby cities in search of jobs, Ramkisan dreamed of becoming a farmer and prove that with Modern Technology and efforts, agriculture could become a profitable venture. In his drought-prone village...

-The Hindu Business Line Noted Gandhian economist Dr Sudarshan Iyengar surveys the distressed agricultural landscape, pinpoints its weaknesses, and prescribes solutions with their roots in Gandhian agronomics. Edited excerpts from an interview to BusinessLine: * Given the agrarian crisis in India today, how relevant are Gandhi's economic principles based on the village economy, and equitable distribution of resources? They are relevant in the context of Gandhi's view of gram swaraj (village self-rule), which...

-The Times of India Manisha Verma, principal secretary, tribal development department, Maharashtra talks to Sugandha Indulkar about The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 and related issues, with today being World Tribal Day. * What’s the precise positioning of the tribal welfare departments at the Centre and states on FRA? This is a seminal legislation. The preamble to the Act itself states that it aims...

-Newsclick.in “Our population today is around 136 crore. Where will you get food grains for them through zero budget farming? This is sheer madness.” There is an inherent seductive charm to the term zero budget natural farming, for it makes the arduous occupation of agriculture appear beguilingly simple, an economic proposition without any risk or even requirement of capital. Coined by the Vidarbha-based farmer, Subhash Palekar, who was bestowed with the Padma...

-Newsclick.in The arguments put forward by the two government advocates to disparage the NSSO’s thwarted report only serve to create a smokescreen so that any meaningful debate on unemployment becomes impossible. In 1965, P. C. Mahalanobis, who founded India’s modern statistical system, wrote a famous article titled “Statistics as a Key Technology” in the journal The American Statistician. One argument in the paper was as follows. Prior to the emergence of science...