-Business Standard While the revised estimates of the gross domestic product (GDP) suggest the Indian economy turned the corner in 2013-14, concerns remain over the durability of this nascent recovery. Particularly worrying is the recent slowdown in rural wage growth, which signals a weakening of rural demand. Growth in rural wages, which had averaged 18 per cent in the previous few years, fell to less than five per cent in September...
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India’s two-speed demography -Prachi Priya & Anuj Agarwal
-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...
More »Small and marginal farmers in distress -R Ramakumar and Aparajita Bakshi
-The Hans India It is official now. New data released by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) for 2013 show that the agrarian distress in rural India is continuing, and even intensifying for small and marginal farmers. In the last decade, there has been much talk on inclusive growth, revival of growth rates in agriculture, higher public investment in agriculture and the doubling of agricultural credit. Yet, the new data show...
More »Livestock supports livelihood of the land poor
Animals, which are used for food, fibre, labour etc. hold a special place in ensuring rural livelihoods. It has been found by the NSSO's 70th Round Report that among the agricultural households having less than 0.01 hectare land (which includes landless agricultural households too), a little above 1/5th reported livestock as their principal source of income whereas 56.4% depended on wage/ salaried employment. However, as the land size went up,...
More »The great forgetting -Himanshu
-The Indian Express The Situation Assessment Survey (SAS) of agricultural households, released last week by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), is the second one ever to be done. The SAS of 2003 was necessitated by the agrarian crisis of the time. Farmer suicides had reached a peak, and the reference year for the survey, 2002-2003, had seen severe drought. The agricultural sector was in crisis, with growth rates slowing to...
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