-TheWire.in The move itself reveals a deep-seated pro-consumer and anti-producer bias that has been, in large part, the reason for the agriculture economy being in doldrums. New Delhi: The government has decided to import onions from ‘Pakistan, Egypt, China, Afghanistan or any other origin’, according to a Metals and Minerals Trading Corporation Limited notifications. Some concerns were raised about importing from Pakistan. “And why import from Pakistan? Is the Indian farmer a...

-Hindustan Times India’s obsession with keeping food prices low, even when there’s no inflationary pressure, has long hurt farm incomes Farming is gloriously uncertain, thanks not just to uncertain weather, but also unpredictable policies. Let’s zoom into the finances of Bhupinder Pal Singh, a horticulturist from Babbain, a village in Haryana, a state that counts itself among the first places where India’s Green Revolution of 1960s began. In good years, Singh would earn...

-Livemint.com Thankfully, India is enjoying a demographic dividend that gives it greater leeway for deficit-financing The dominant consensus on the slowdown in India is that we have a demand problem. Lack of aggregate demand is a phrase that goes back to John Maynard Keynes. He is a ghost who reappears from time to time, however much one tries to bury him. Regardless of whether you are a Keynes devotee or not, his...

-The Indian Express The certainty that producers once enjoyed — of finding buyers for their wares without doing much beyond minor price adjustments to bring supply and demand into equilibrium — has ceased to exist. India traditionally never had a demand problem. On the contrary, its economy was always supply-constrained. Proof of no demand paucity is that between 2000-01 and 2015-16, domestic consumption of both finished steel and cement roughly trebled, from...

-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...