-The Indian Express Govt must learn from mistakes in onions and potatoes, agriculture should be spared of bearing the burden of its inflation targeting. Last week, Union Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced a 5% subsidy on onion exports in the form of transferable duty credit scrips that can be used to pay customs, excise or service tax. On top of it, the Maharashtra government extended a Rs 100 per quintal grant to...
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Harvesting Solar - in fields! -Ashok Gulati, Stuti Manchanda & Rakesh Kacker
-The Indian Express Farmers can install solar panels on their fields that can generate income in addition to regular crop agriculture. Of its several new initiatives, the Narendra Modi government has set out at least two very ambitious targets, which are also quantifiable. One is achieving 100 giga-watts (GW) of solar power generation capacity by the year 2022. The other is doubling farmers’ income — presumably in real terms — also by 2022,...
More »Agrarian distress: Farmer suicides and the collapse of cooperative credit institutions -Partha Sarathi Biswas
-The Indian Express The incidence of farmers taking their own lives is higher in regions where cooperative banks are the weakest. Nanded (Maharashtra): The verdant soyabean fields at Digras today are a far cry from the barren landscape they presented only a few months ago. But for residents of this village in Ardhapur taluka of Nanded district, the memories of drought in three out of the last four years will not fade...
More »Health in India: Where the money comes from and where it goes? -Samarth Bansal
-The Hindu It has long been argued that government spending on health should increase to 2.5 per cent of GDP. National Health Accounts (NHA) monitors the flow of resources in a country’s health system and provides detailed data on health finances. The NHA estimates for India for the financial year 2013-14 were published earlier this week, after a long void of almost a decade. The previous estimates were for the year 2004-05. In...
More »From Plate to Plough: Seize the crisis -Ashok Gulati & Shweta Saini
-The Indian Express Government has the opportunity to rein in food inflation on a sustainable basis. In his Independence Day speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi counted his government’s achievements. Bringing down inflation from double digits to below six per cent was emphatically mentioned as one that brought relief to the aam aadmi. Without doubt, we witnessed moderation in the overall consumer price index (CPI) and wholesale price index (WPI) levels in the past...
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