-Down to Earth Every rupee spent on weather forecasting fetches 50-fold economic gains to below poverty line farming families   A survey by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) has shown that timely delivery of weather advisories to farmers had a significant impact on their income. The survey was done to gauge the economic impact of India’s Investments on the National Monsoon Mission (NMM) and High Performance Computing Facilities (HPC). It...

-Society for Social and Economic Research The economic reforms which were started in 1991 shifted the focus of fertilizer policies away from playing a leading role in building the fertilizer industry and ensuring the availability of fertilizers at affordable prices to farmers. Under the neo-liberal policy framework, reducing the fiscal burden of fertilizer subsidies and the foreign exchange burden of fertilizer-related imports became the overriding concerns of the state.  Interestingly, the post-liberalisation...

-Newsclick.in In 2006, chief minister Nitish Kumar scrapped the APMC Act in Bihar and the destructive effects can be seen in the seething anger amongst farmers. What the Narendra Modi government recently did through passing laws to deregulate agricultural trade, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar had accomplished 14 years ago, in 2006. Soon after becoming chief minister in alliance with Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), he scrapped Bihar’s Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee (APMC)...

-News18.com The new National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020 hereafter) has rekindled the debate on the various kinds of problems in Indian education. One of the problems which has bothered me is the need for reforms in rural government elementary schools, more specifically the need for addressing the problem of sub-optimal schooling experiences and poor learning outcomes of poor rural children. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2014 brought out...

-Newsclick.in Reforms in labour laws will not create jobs, if at all, the conditions of employment will be a “disaster”, they say. The labour codes approved by Parliament are the wrong solution for the wrong problem, experts and academicians argue, even as the Centre continues to harp on about bolstering Investments and creating jobs through relaxing regulatory laws, now, more desperately in the wake of the pandemic-triggered disruptions. The wrong problem: labour laws...