-Economic and Political Weekly Farmers' unions and political parties have been demanding the implementation of the Swaminathan minimum support price (cost plus 50%) to address agrarian crisis and farmers' distress. But they have not raised demands for the implementation of the recommendations of the National Commission on Farmers, which have the potential to provide lasting solutions. Ranjit Singh Ghuman (ghumanrs@yahoo.co.uk) is a Nehru SAIL Chair Professor, Centre for Research in Rural and...
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India's Handloom Challenge Anatomy of a Crisis -Ashoke Chatterjee
-Economic and Political Weekly The Indian weaver is dismissed in high places as an embarrassing anachronism, despite demand for his or her skills and products. In the new millennium, globalisation and a mindless acquiescence to imported notions of a good life threaten to take over, even as the West looks East for better concepts of sustainable living. Analysing today's crisis in the handloom sector, plagued by low-cost imitations from power looms,...
More »Many degrees of hopelessness in India's villages -Harsh Mander
-Hindustan Times The picture of rural Indian life today that emerges from what is probably the world's largest study ever of household deprivation is sobering and sombre. It describes a massive hinterland still imprisoned in persisting endemic impoverishment, want, illiteracy and indeed hopelessness. It tells a story that every thinking and caring Indian must heed. Advocates of free markets, opposed to building a welfare state, have long argued that accelerated market-led economic...
More »Agriculture can be highly profitable, but the gains are not easy to sustain -Vivian Fernandes
-FirstPost.com Travelling across the country for the past five months to bring farmers’ voices to urban audiences through a programme called ‘Smart Agriculture’ - to be broadcast every Saturday and Sunday from 25 July on CNN-IBN - we have learnt that agriculture is not a low-profit activity. In fact, it returns more than double the amount of cash invested. Sandipan Suman, a 47 year-old agricultural sciences graduate and maize grower in Bihar’s...
More »Limits of the SECC Data
-Economic and Political Weekly This is not "big data" to be used to cut down welfare expenditure. It was the Ministry of Rural Development which, for close to five years beginning in 2010, designed, planned and oversaw the execution of the 2011 Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC), whose first batch of results were released earlier this month. Yet, it was somewhat unusual to see Union Minister for Finance, Arun Jaitley, rather...
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