-The Indian Express The last quarterly survey by the Labour Bureau showed that India has never created so few jobs, since the survey started in 2009 The last quarterly survey by the Labour Bureau showed that India has never created so few jobs, since the survey started in 2009, as in 2015: Only 1.35 lakh jobs compared to more than nine lakh in 2011 and 4.19 lakh in 2013 in eight labour-intensive...

-The Indian Express Why the revival of exports matters as much as rains for Indian farmers. It is generally held that the woes of Indian farmers today have had largely to do with extreme weather events. The southwest monsoon failed in both 2014 and 2015. Besides, we had extensive crop damage from unseasonal rain and hailstorms over large parts of north, west and central India in March 2015. From this also follows the...

-The Indian Express Because this time, it’s only rural producers, not urban consumers, who are feeling the heat This time’s drought has been a most unusual one. Even with three consecutive bad crops (kharif 2014, rabi 2015, and kharif 2015) and a fourth not-so-great one (thankfully, there’s been no big damage from the unseasonal rain and hail unlike in March 2015), annual consumer food price inflation is only 5.3 per cent. In the...

-The Indian Express The number of arhtiya suicides may not be anywhere close to those by farmers, but they do suggest a certain trend. When prices of commodities, be it basmati rice or cotton, were good, farmers planted with gusto. The ongoing agrarian crisis has spread beyond farmers to consume even arhtiyas or grain commission agents, as a report in this newspaper from Punjab has shown. The number of arhtiya suicides may...

-The Indian Express Never before has India’s agricultural science community been as demoralised as now Everyone knows Indian agriculture is in deep crisis, impacting around 115 million farmers and an equal number of landless cultivators. Two consecutive bad monsoons and falling commodity prices have resulted in the imports of edible oils and pulses touching all-time-highs, even as its exports of agri-products — from basmati rice, soya meal, sugar, milk powder and...