-The Indian Express According to the Central Statistics Office, there were 24.95 crore households in India in 2011. If every household in the bottom 20 per cent is eligible for this income, this translates into a total expenditure of about Rs 3.6 lakh crore annually. When Congress president Rahul Gandhi announced that his party, if voted to power, would offer a minimum income of Rs 72,000 a year for the poorest 20...

-The Indian Express Agrarian crisis is an opportunity, for the government that assumes office after elections, to enact a law giving farmers the right to sell any quantity of their produce to anybody, anywhere and at any time. The German obsession with sound currency has been conditioned by the collective memory of the Great Hyperinflation of 1922-23, just as American intolerance to double-digit unemployment and stock market crashes is traceable to...

Recent studies and media reports have confirmed that Indian farmers are facing non-remunerative and sometimes falling prices. A past news alert by the Inclusive Media for Change team indicated deflation in wholesale prices of 8 kharif crops (viz. maize, arhar, moong, urad, groundnut, soybean, sunflower seed and Niger seed) on average between 2016-17 and 2018-19. Based on data analysis, that news alert also demonstrated how the rural areas have witnessed...

-The Indian Express The last five years, in other words, have seen a slowdown in rural wages even after adjusting for inflation, which has been far lower than during the UPA regime. Rural wages have grown 3.8 per cent year-on-year in December, the lowest ever for this month. Together with depressed farm prices — annual wholesale inflation in December was minus 0.07 per cent for “food” and 4.45 per cent for...

-The Indian Express Policy still hasn’t adjusted itself to address the crisis of agricultural produce deflation. India’s agricultural output grew by hardly 2.7 per cent during the last October-December quarter. That isn’t bad, if one takes the corresponding year-on-year increases for the preceding 10 quarters; these have ranged between 4.2 per cent and 7.5 per cent. The cause for concern is that these reasonably good production growth rates in “real” terms...