-The Hindu Facilitating a bargain between wealth accumulators and welfare seekers seems to have become the key function of politics A new election season is around. Five States (Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Manipur, Goa and Punjab) will elect new Assemblies and Chief Ministers in the coming weeks. Parties are wooing voters with dazzling new promises. The Aam Aadmi Party leader, Arvind Kejriwal, is offering ₹1,000 a month to all adult women (above age...
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The pitfalls of legalising farm support prices -A Narayanamoorthy
-The Hindu Business Line There is no guarantee farmers’ income will rise as the methodology for estimating cost of production is outdated, defective Although the farmers’ agitation that lasted over one year was finally called-off, their demand for a law guaranteeing minimum support prices (MSP) for crops is continuing. Can the MSP be legalised in a country that produces about 1,000 million tonnes of agri-commodities? If so, who will benefit from it?...
More »How MGNREGS is Gradually Being Choked of Funds -Prabhat Patnaik
-Newsclick.in The Narendra Modi government has carried the practice of making low budgetary allocations for MGNREGS to its limit. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme or MGNREGS was introduced by the United Progressive Alliance-I government despite opposition from the neo-liberal lobby within it, owing inter alia to the active intervention of the Left, which was supporting that government from outside. The scheme was restrictive from the beginning: it promised a maximum...
More »MSP is Insurance Against Anarchy in Future: Economist Sukhpal Singh -Ajaz Ashraf
-Newsclick.in Answers to all the questions you are likely to have about the Minimum Support Price and the controversy surrounding it. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s hope that his promise to repeal the three new farm laws will have the protesting farmers to promptly fold their tents and leave Delhi has been belied. The farmer unions have instead declared that they are not going to call off their one-year stir until the Union...
More »Haryana’s deficit payment scheme still a work in progress, I learnt in my mandi visits -Yogendra Yadav
-ThePrint.in Farmers, farm leaders, economists and policy makers would do well to study this scheme carefully as it shows a possible path to the future. Anew model? Or another fiasco in the making? I kept asking my colleagues and myself as we travelled across the semi-arid bajra growing belt of south Haryana. We stopped at a few mandis — Rewari, Kanina, Ateli, Narnaul, Dadari and Bhiwani — and spoke to farmers, adhatiyas...
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