-The Indian Express As per data being examined by the committee, the minimum wages paid to agricultural workers are significantly higher than MGNREGA wages in Karnataka, Punjab, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, West Bengal, Mizoram, and Andaman and the Nicobar Islands. THE COMMITTEE for revision of wages paid under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Generation Act (MGNREGA) has found that minimum agricultural wages are higher than MGNREGA wages in 15 states. An upward revision...
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Is direct benefit transfer really a panacea for the rural poor? -Sanjiv Phansalkar
-VillageSquare.in Given the complex and varied situations in rural India, the results of the direct benefit transfer method are so far mixed at best and debilitating at worst, as seen in the subsidies for farm equipment and fertilizers Direct benefit transfer (DBT), a system through which government programs transfer funds directly to bank accounts of beneficiaries, is hailed as a major intervention that is expected to cut a whole lot of misdirection...
More »Unaffordable sacredness of our cattle -Himanshu Upadhyaya
-GovernanceNow.com The cost of maintaining our 5.3 million stray cattle comes to about Rs 30,115 core per year A lot of debate that we witness in the media on the cattle question these days suffer from the disease of speculative utopian imagination of a ‘cow-nation’ and relentless abuses for those beef-eating ‘others’. Political debates over the question of our bovine stock has mostly been heavily polarising and mindlessly simplistic, notwithstanding exceptions like veteran...
More »Small farms are eating away farmers' profits and productivity -Harini Calamur
-DNA Most of Europe avoided the fate of India, because of a very strict feudal law — that of following primogeniture, a system of inheritance by the firstborn (usually the first born son). Karnataka — preceded by UP, Punjab and Maharashtra — is the fourth state to have waived off loans taken by farmers. However, this is not going to be the end of the matter. You are likely to...
More »Farmer suicides: 70% of India's farm families spend more than they earn -Devanik Saha
-IndiaSpend.org The failing economics of such farms–Agricultural households in the south are most indebted–are exacerbated by additional loans that families take to meet health issues, leaving them with diminished ability to invest in farming. Nearly 70% of India’s 90 million Agricultural households spend more than they earn on average each month, pushing them towards debt, which is now the primary reason in more than half of all suicides by farmers nationwide,...
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