-Livemint.com Loan waiver promises fell short of farmers’ expectations in states like Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Punjab New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janta Party’s (BJP’s) poll promise in Karnataka to waive off farm loans is likely to intensify demands for a similar waiver in other states such as Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan which go to polls this year. In February last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had promised to waive off farm loans...

-Business Standard/ India Spend Delays in wage payment have been a constant throughout MGNREGS implementation Bachcha Lal’s shirt hung loosely over his frail body, exposing his sunken collarbones, as he stood outside his straw-thatched home in central Uttar Pradesh’s (UP) Bundelkhand region. “They all rely on me,” he said, pointing towards his tubercular son, daughter-in-law and grand-daughter. Illiterate and a landless labourer, 65-year-old Lal makes about Rs 175 a day when he...

-Livemint.com India’s weather office has forecast a normal monsoon. Bountiful rains in the June-to-September period are critical for about 800 million Indians who depend directly or indirectly on farming New Delhi: Gangabhishan Thaware, a 53-year-old farmer from the drought-prone Marathwada region of Maharashtra, took an unusual step in July last year. Thaware and his fellow villagers had toiled on their fields and spent thousands of rupees on seeds and fertilizers, hopeful...

-CaravanMagazine.in Crimes against minorities in India, specifically Dalits and Muslims, have risen dramatically since the Bharatiya Janata Party government led by Narendra Modi came to power in 2014. A reasonable reaction to such hate crimes would have included increasing the allocation of funds to policing machinery at the local and state level. Instead, the Public Policy Research Centre, a BJP-affiliated think tank, had proposed that the state respond by shooting the...

-Scroll.in A new report says that a crop-neutral direct payout scheme might be better than paying farmers the difference between market price and production cost. Raising minimum support prices to 1.5 times the cost of production could severely distort agricultural markets, suggests a new report from the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations. The report takes a look at government schemes to bolster the crop procurement process. The Centre offers...