The fertiliser ministry is mooting a proposal to raise Urea prices by 10%. With this proposed revision, which will have to be endorsed by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs, Urea prices will go up from Rs 5,310 per tonne to Rs 5,841 per tonne. This will help the government to reduce its annual subsidy burden by around Rs 2,000 crore. At present , the annual Urea subsidy bill is in...
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Centre's new plan to delay fertiliser subsidy phaseout-Rituraj Tiwari & M Rajshekhar
UPA-II's plans to replace the existing fertiliser subsidy regime with direct cash transfers to farmers will be delayed as the fertiliser ministry is likely to scrap an intermediate phase where the subsidy was to be rerouted from companies to retailers this summer. This puts paid to the fertilizer industry's expectation that very soon it would be out of the subsidy mechanism which locks up precious working capital. "We are rethinking the original...
More »Message to CM from unploughed fields by Pranesh Sarkar
-The Telegraph Farmers in Bengal left around 2.8 lakh hectares uncultivated in the just-concluded boro crop season, a silent expression of no-confidence in the state government’s paddy procurement process and a fallout of rising fertiliser prices. The area cultivated in the boro season (January to end-February) can be considered a barometer for man-made farming systems because farmers largely depend on irrigation during this phase. The bigger aman crop (June to August) still...
More »Budget 2012: Farce of food subsidy being played out again-Nidhi Nath Srinivas
The UPA-II has used the Budget to again play politics with hunger. But it has paid no heed to the ticking time bomb of growing social tensions as 58 million Indians living off agriculture slide deeper into poverty. The Economic Survey says more than half the population is dependent on a sector whose share in the economy is shrinking. The urban-rural income divide is therefore steadily widening, a tinder box that...
More »Subsidy bill reduction target ‘ambitious’-Aman Malik
The government plans to cut its subsidy bill to under 2% of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 2012-13, finance minister Pranab Mukherjee said in his budget speech on Friday. High crude oil prices and burgeoning fertilizer subsidies, primarily on account of imported non-Urea fertilizers, have meant India’s subsidy bill has zoomed to Rs2.16 trillion, or 2.5% of the GDP. Mukherjee has set an ambitious target to reduce this to under 1.75%...
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