-The Indian Express The recent tweaks to the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana, including making it 100% voluntary and capping premiums at 30%, are going to be a game-changer. The Centre has recently revamped the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) that will have far-reaching impact on the implementation of this flagship crop insurance scheme. Launched in the 2016 kharif season, PMFBY makes the insurance companies liable for full risk coverage. Farmers...

-Frontline.in The Budget lacks any serious effort to address the main issues of unemployment, Agrarian distress and falling incomes, revealing a high level of official insensitivity. A Budget during a time of recession, increasing unemployment, Agrarian distress, falling incomes, demand constraint and malnutrition would have done well to first acknowledge the mess that policies have created and then taken steps to provide employment, boost rural incomes, increase purchasing power and thereby demand. Coming...

-PTI Statistics for female farmer suicides are "complete rubbish" as the discussion on women victims of Agrarian crisis often becomes a discussion of their role as widows of male farmers, he said. New Delhi: Tens of thousands of women get excluded from the farmer suicides data in the country just because they are never considered as farmers, senior journalist-cum-agriculture expert P Sainath said on Friday. Delivering his valedictorian address at the XVI National...

  The Union Budget 2020-21, which was presented by the Finance Minister Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman on 1st February, 2020 has failed to impress civil society activists and farmers' rights groups (click here  and here). Through their press releases and notes, members of CSOs were demanding as well as suggesting the Union Government for hiking the budgetary allocation for schemes like Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and Pradhan Mantri...

-The Indian Express Turnaround in farm prices is the only good news in today’s overall dismal economic environment. The Narendra Modi government’s first term (June 2014 to May 2019) was marked by benign consumer food price inflation. At a mere 3.3% year-on-year, it averaged below even the 4.3% for overall retail inflation. Politically, the ruling party benefited, given that there are far more consumers of milk in India than dairy farmers. The...