-The Indian Express While the Devendra Fadnavis government in Maharashtra can claim satisfaction for doing everything possible to ensure payment by mills — and before state polls, hardly three months away — that sentiment isn’t really echoed on the ground. Pune: Maharashtra’s Assembly elections are due in October, which is also when the next 2019-20 sugar season takes off. “The current unpaid dues to our cane growers will be cleared well...

-The Hindu Business Line Despite a lively debate in recent weeks on whether food prices have now moved to being structurally low, analysts believe that this is only a transient phenomenon and food prices, on a sequential basis, have already begun to rise. Retail inflation may be at an 18-month low but prices, especially of food items, are likely to see a pick-up over the next few months with average inflation expected...

-Financial Express With elections approaching, every party is swearing by farmers and trying to woo them for their votes. The Modi government has already announced a package of Rs 75,000 crore for about 12.6 crore small and marginal farmers. While in absolute terms it looks sizeable, when it is divided by the number of farm families to be covered, it is miniscule—just `6,000 per family per year, which is about 6%...

-The Hindu The Interim Budget makes clear the class hierarchy in the Modi government’s scheme of populism Interim Budget 2019 has sought to make amends for all the wrongs of almost five years of the Narendra Modi government. For example, the debilitating impact of demonetisation on the informal sector that employs nearly 90% of the workforce had long been suspected on the basis of anecdotal evidence. The findings of the National Sample...

-The Indian Express By all accounts, 2018 has been a year of deep losses for Maharashtra’s onion growers. IT HAS been a couple of weeks since Sanjay Balkrishna Sathe, 44, sent Prime Minister Narendra Modi an online money order of Rs 1,064 — the proceeds from the sale of 750 kg of his “top quality” onions at the Niphad marketplace in Nashik, home to half of India’s onion crop. The money...