-PTI Mumbai: Seasonal spurt in vegetable prices next month could partly reverse the benefits of low global oil prices reducing inflation and increasing disposable incomes, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) warned on Tuesday. "The sharp reduction in oil prices as well as in inflation is likely to increase personal disposable incomes and improve domestic demand conditions in the year ahead," the central bank said in its monetary policy document. Inflation, excluding food...

-The Hindu Business Line   A device that literally makes light of the rice parboiling process Bhuvani Devi, a frail-looking woman in her early thirties, has taken up a new challenge - to produce a tonne of parboiled rice in Baarwan village in Jharkhand's Deoghar district. Unlike what the region's paddy farmers did until now, she wants to process and sell parboiled rice rather than paddy itself. "We used to sell paddy at...

-Down to Earth The situation of India's farmers has only become grimmer in the past decade, according to the latest National Sample Survey Office report The lot of the embattled Indian farmer only keeps on getting worse with the passage of time. In the last 10 years, the voluminous debt of Indian agricultural households has increased almost four-fold whereas their undersized monthly income from cultivation has increased three-fold. Even the number of...

-The Indian Express It's likely that India's crop production this year will be lower compared to 2013-14, given deficient rains both in the southwest (June-September) and northeast (October-December) monsoons impacting kharif as well as rabi plantings. But that by itself needn't be cause for concern. We have seen one-off farm output declines even in 2009-10, 2004-05 and 2002-03, which were also drought years. What should worry us more, instead, is the...

-The Financial Express With 66% of its population under the age of 35, India is home to the largest cohort of young people in the world-825 million. The median age of the country is just 27 years, much below 37 in the US and 46 in Japan. Numbers like these suggest that India has a competitive advantage over China and other Asian countries-a demographic dividend. But favourable demographics do not imply that...