-Down to Earth MGNREGA workers in Bengal not paid wages of Rs 2744 crore for a year, report by Libtech India found   The central government has withheld release of Rs 7,500 crore in MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) funds to West Bengal for a year now over “non-compliance of central government directives”, a report released on December 26, 2022 claimed. A whopping Rs 2,744 crore of the Rs 7,500...

-PTI/ The Telegraph    The levy on crude down to Rs 1,700 per tonne from Rs 4,900, as per order coming into effect Friday New Delhi: The government has slashed the windfall Profit tax levied on domestically-produced crude oil as well as on export of diesel and ATF following a drop in global oil prices, according to an official order. The levy on crude oil produced by companies such as Oil and Natural...

-India Spend India's transition to sustainable farming has to be calibrated and orchestrated well, drawing lessons from the successes of India's Green Revolution and the recent crisis in Sri Lanka, says sustainable farming expert P.S. Vijayshankar Bengaluru: The production-centric intensive agriculture brought about by India's Green Revolution in the 1960s, using high-yielding seeds, fertilisers and high levels of groundwater utilisation, helped India achieve food self-sufficiency by the 1970s, but has created a...

-Networkideas.org The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent war sparked rapid and dramatic increases in some global trade prices, particularly for fuel products, wheat and fertilizer for which Russia and Ukraine are major exporters. It is now clear that these price changes were not due to actual changes in total supply, which remained largely unchanged (although source locations and trade routes shifted). Instead, market expectations amplified by media hype, financial...

There is some respite expected for India in terms of prices of imported commodities. This may ease the depletion of its foreign exchange reserves. The country has faced a widening of its merchandise trade deficit from US$ -17.91 billion to US$ -26.91 billion between October 2021 and October 2022. The commodity price data provided by the World Bank in December 2022 (termed as The Pink Sheet) shows that energy prices plummeted by...