-TheWire.in This year has been yet another bad one for the agriculture sector. With just 0.2% growth in the last quarter, a good monsoon was essential to revive the sector. However, a deficient monsoon worsened the situation and as many as nine states have been forced to declare a drought. With almost 60% of India’s workforce engaged in agriculture, the slowdown has immensely affected the rural economy. The rural distress has in...

-The Indian Express There is a worrying dearth of Indian economists working on agriculture today. In his classic Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went, John Kenneth Galbraith observed how the economics profession had a well-defined order of precedence. At the top were the economic theorists and specialists in banking and finance. At the bottom of the hierarchy were agricultural economists. George F. Warren from Cornell University was even worse — a...

-Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Programmes proliferate but vast majority of rural poor remain uncovered by social protection Rome: Social protection is emerging as a critical tool in the drive to eradicate hunger, yet the vast majority of the world's rural poor are yet to be covered. The State of Food and Agriculture 2015 published by FAO today finds that in poor countries, social protection schemes - such as cash transfers, school feeding...

-The Hindu ‘Safe Travels!’ we wish those travelling to distant places. It is an unhappy situation that in India, we need to wish many a woman ‘safe travels’ as she steps out to work. Well publicised instances of violence against women working in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector during workplace-related travel as well as some not so broadly-known experiences of women in blue collar work, point to a problem that...

-The Hindu The production of waste in India is growing at an exponential rate. However, the welfare and dignity of the informal workers involved in the stigmatised sector of waste management remains at the bottom of any government’s political agenda. Human society has always produced waste and always will. Waste materials — substances without value — are constantly generated in all production, all distribution and all consumption processes. The time waste spends...