-Economic and Political Weekly Farmer suicides are an unfortunate result of the agrarian distress plaguing the Rural Economy of many states of the country. Marathwada and Vidarbha regions in Maharashtra have recorded very high numbers of farmer suicides, and an attempt to calculate the number of suicides and the suicide mortality rate is the first step towards gaining an in-depth understanding of the prevalence and seriousness of the issue. An analysis...

-Hindustan Times Move beyond State-market, rural-urban, agri-non agri and welfare-growth binaries. They are linked This has been a difficult three months for India. The policy response to the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) and the lockdown has forced it to confront long-ignored realities about the Indian economy — its fragility, regional and spatial concentration and deep structural inequity. It also made visible sources of precarious resilience. Agriculture and associated supply chains, for instance, held...

-TheWire.in While the increased allocation and attention is welcome, it will not be enough to counter the crisis. The current pandemic has led to loss of livelihood of substantial sections of the India population. With the economy, particularly production activities in the big urban centres, having come to a standstill, a process of reverse migration to villages took place. This decline in economic activities is taking place against a background of continuously...

-TheWire.in As a fresh spotlight hits India's rural employment programme, two suggestions have been offered to “repurpose” MGNREGA to utilise the additional labour force that have returned to their villages. Due to the sudden lockdown and resultant job losses, over one crore people have returned to their homes, some walking hundreds of kilometres, others using all conceivable means of transport – buses, trucks, trailers, concrete mixers, Shramik trains, motorcycles, scooters, bicycles, auto...

-The Telegraph Seasonal sowing, MGNREGA boost prospects The grim employment scenario in urban India got aggravated while the rural sector showed some improvement in the last week of May, with researchers attributing the uptick in the villages to seasonal sowing activities and increase in work under the MGNREGA while calling the overall condition critical. Data released by private research group Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) show that the unemployment rate for the...