Despite high prices of fruits and vegetables, India's area under horticultural crops - mainly fruits, vegetables, spices and flowers - has doubled in around twenty years (between 1991-92 and 2012-13). This has resulted in increase in production of horticultural crops nearly threefold (2.8 times). A new report from the Ministry of Agriculture says that the area under horticultural crops during this period rose from 12.77 million hectares to 23.69 million...
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Banking on a flimsy promise -Jitendra
-Down to Earth The government is clueless about incentives it has promised under its Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana to bring every family under the formal banking system ON AUGUST 15, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced extending the financial inclusion plan of the former UPA government and renamed it Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY), he was well aware of its limitations. Though launched in 2010, the plan had miserably failed...
More »Battered & bruised, Planning Commission loses more of its teeth -Sanjeeb Mukherjee
-The Business Standard Most key functions now handled by the finance ministry and other govt departments When Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently extended a Rs 8,000-crore central support for building roads in Jammu & Kashmir, Union Cabinet's approval for the big-ticket announcement came in barely 48 hours. Unlike in the past, the proposal did not get stuck in the corridors of the Planning Commission, a Nehruvian-era body. The Commission, which occupied the centre...
More »Why This Attack on MGNREGA?
-Economic and Political Weekly One knows who will suffer if the Narendra Modi government succeeds in weakening MGNREGA. The largest public employment programme the world has ever seen is in trouble. In 2013-14, 74 million individuals in 48 million households in rural India were employed under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act programme (or MGNREGA as it is called), with each household on average finding work for 46 days. This...
More »Govt may downsize MGNREGA to boost scheme impact on the poor -Chetan Chauhan
-The Hindustan Times For fiscal prudence and better outcome of public expenditure, the Narendra Modi government is likely to downsize some of the social sector schemes, including the rural job guarantee programme, the biggest grosser of the central funds. Finance minister Arun Jaitley had allocated about Rs. 33,351 crore for Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) in his budget this July but many believe that the huge expenditure was not...
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