-The Indian Express Linking it to ration cards ends up denying poor their rightful entitlements In September 2017, 11-year-old Santoshi, resident of Simdega district of Jharkhand, succumbed to starvation. According to her mother, she died “asking for rice, but there was not a single grain at home”. She was deprived of her subsidised ration as her family’s ration card was cancelled because it was not linked to Aadhaar. Marandi in Jharkhand met...

  The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare has contended that the growth in real Gross Value Added (GVA) by the agrarian sector will not decline in 2017-18 vis-à-vis 2016-17 as has been predicted by the Central Statistics Office (CSO). The first advance estimates of CSO show that the growth rate in GVA at basic price (at 2011-12 prices) of the 'Agriculture, forestry & fishing' sector is likely to dip from 4.9...

-Livemint.com The agriculture sector is expected to grow higher than projected 2.1% growth rate in 2017-18 due to likely better output of Kharif and Rabi crop s, the ministry said New Delhi: Days after the Central Statistics Office (CSO) estimated India’s farm growth rate at a poor 2.1% in 2017-18, the agriculture ministry on Sunday said it expects the farm sector to grow at a much higher rate, based on better-than-expected production...

-The Economic Times Politicians in India firmly believe that the woes of farmers can be solved with freebies: free electricity, free water, farm loan waivers, fertilisers and seed subsidies, minimum support prices, etc. Little attention is paid to what really ails Indian agriculture: low productivity. From rice to wheat to coarse grains and pulses, from cash crops to Food crops, Indian agriculture is punctured with very low productivity. Let's start with rice....

-TheWire.in While the nitty-gritties of GST work are handled by the council, slippage in revenues are a result of poor design, which is why a road map for reforming the GST is needed. I don’t envy finance minister Arun Jaitley. The fiscal situation is looking rather grim, with the fiscal deficit target amount for the entire year having already been exceeded by 12 percentage points, with a full quarter of the fiscal...