-The Economic Times The agriculture sector and farmers are passing through a difficult phase. The sector suffered a blow from back-to-back droughts during 2014-15 and 2015-16 followed by low and depressed farm level prices during 2016-17 and kharif 2017, mainly due to global price trends. This has intensified the demand for ensuring MSP (minimum support price) and raising MSP. The forthcoming budget needs to take a call to launch effective measures to...

-The Hindu It is crucial to align policy across sectors and upgrade the country’s social infrastructure In India’s highly segmented labour market, one can still discern at least three demographic groups that are in urgent need of jobs: a growing number of better educated youth; uneducated agricultural workers who wish to leave agricultural distress behind; and young women, who too are better educated than ever before. India is indeed the fastest growing large economy...

-The Hindu The unorganised manufacturing sector should be reoriented towards non-household units to provide efficiency gains. Ever since E.F. Schumacher, a British economist, published in 1973 his book Small is Beautiful, implying that small units are better in terms of performance indicators and labour absorption, several studies have endorsed the same idea and argued in favour of promoting small units. Stretching the argument a little further, it may be emphasised that small...

-Hindustan Times Sukhwant Singh, a farmer in Haryana’s Kurukshetra, had most of his 12 acres of agricultural land under paddy. After harvesting his crop, he set the paddy stubble on fire, burning it to the ground within a few hours. Singh and most other paddy growers in Punjab and Haryana, who are facing financial constraints due to falling productivity and dwindling returns, do not care about the ban on stubble burning put...

Expanding irrigation network in the country is considered as essential to raise agricultural production in the face of increased frequency of droughts. However, a newly released report from the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare shows that there has actually been a fall in the growth rate of net irrigated area during the recent two decades. The report entitled State of Indian Agriculture 2015-16 reveals that the growth rate in...