-The Hindu Business Line Meet Jaitley for pre-Budget discussion New Delhi: Experts from the agriculture sector have sought measures to offset the impact of inflation on crops and income security for farmers and also debated the farm loan waiver at a pre-Budget meeting with Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Tuesday. This was the first such meeting and the Finance Minister will meet more sectoral groups this week to get their proposals for the...

-The Hindu Business Line Procurement of the excess output vis-a-vis a normal year, rather than open-ended purchase, is a viable option A bountiful harvest that implies an increase in output may not always increase the nominal income of the farming sector, which is subject to the behaviour of input and more particularly output prices, which may sometimes move sharply. There can, therefore, be years in which there is a sudden and sharp...

-The Hindu Business Line Mumbai: Astride soyabean sacks, 33-year-old market intermediary Parmeshwar Suryavanshi is literally at the top of his game.   Suryavanshi belongs to the set of middlemen, locally called Adityas, at the Agriculture Produce Market Committee (APMC)-controlled marketyard at Latur in Maharashtra. Below MSP prices When he raises his voice to call out bids, he also raises prices of soyabean though not quite enough to reach the minimum support price (MSP) of ?3,050/quintal....

-The Times of India An NGO in Chhattisgarh is addressing the urgent deficit in nutrition by providing three meals a day to children under three along with daycare Sumita Dhruv's life revolves around rice — sowing, irrigating, and harvesting it. And yet very little of it reaches her two-year-old daughter Shristi. Like most children in the village of Baigahara, 50 km from Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh, Shristi was born underweight. Her eyes were...

-Down to Earth Jean Dreze argues that we should not leave the making of an equitable society to experts alone What does one make of the shameful statistic that over 200 million Indians still subsist below the poverty line? How does one square it with the equally obscene distinction that we have the world’s fourth largest number of billionaires, thus making India the second most unequal nation after Russia? Indeed, how...