When little children in cities have a Happy Meal burger at McDonalds and get a Batman car or Ben 10 toy free, they are getting much more for free — all gift-wrapped by wheat and potato farmers in some far-off village. They are not paying for the labour put in by the farmer, the profits forgone by him, and the higher cost of living that he did not bill on...

More things change more they remain the same! UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi has given her full support; two Congress chief ministers have written to the Prime Minister; a High Court (A.P) has ruled that the current wage rate violated the Minimum Wages Act 1948 --- but the rural workers are still getting the same old rate.  When the MGNREGA workers lifted their 47-day dharna at Jaipur after the Centre and...

Principal Advisor to Planning Commission Pronab Sen, who is heading a committee on wages, has said states are bound to pay prevailing minimum wages to workers under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. His view contradicts the stand taken by the rural development ministry, which had said that NREGA exempts itself from other laws including the Minimum Wages Act and hence the Centre is not obliged to reimburse states according to...

Pawan Goenka noticed something unusual last year—tractor sales were climbing even though India had its worst monsoon in more than three decades and farm output dropped 2.8% in the three months to December last fiscal. The umbilical cord that tied rainfall patterns and tractor sales seemed to have been ruptured. The president of auto and tractor maker Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd offers an interesting explanation to this puzzle: growing labour shortages...

The papers in this volume, as indicated in the preface, are not envisaged to be mere academic exercises; they are intended to provide the basis for informed discussions among key stakeholders and with policymakers involved in the areas related to agriculture, food security and rural development in India. If achieving self-sufficiency in food is the primary goal of agriculture policy, poverty alleviation is the second. As has been pointed out,...