-TheWire.in In 2016-17, pending payments under the employment scheme in the state amounted to a whopping Rs 5,571 crore. Tiravur, Tamil Nadu: “I could kill someone,” said Janaki Chinarasu in early June at her home in Tiruvarur, protecting her forehead from the heat with her hands askew. “It’s like the sun god has conspired with the rain god to punish us.” Chinarasu is a frail, strong-witted woman with a five-year-old on her lap...

-Hindustan Times The design of large injections of public funds for India’s agriculture economy needs to be informed with rigorous evaluations on what is effective for higher farm productivity. A wage subsidy for farm-labour is one modification that needs an evaluation, to generate evidence to inform how the MGNREGA policy generates employment when there is need, but without stress to farm production Indian agriculture is witnessing a period of complex socio-economic distress,...

-ThePrint.in From mixing the stubble into soil, to making manure and use in the packaging industry, there are a lot of ways in which the problem of stubble burning can be solved. North-west India is currently in the grips of a poisonous smog, produced by farmers through paddy straw and stubble burning. The smog is affecting the germination and growth of crops, as well has having a harmful effect on human health. Farmers...

-The Indian Express The transition from a regime of ‘downward stickiness’ to ‘upward stickiness’ has relevance beyond economic jargon. Here’s how Agricultural commodity prices in India have traditionally exhibited what economists call “downward stickiness” — resistance to any declines, while rising at the slightest demand-supply imbalance. That conventional wisdom may have been turned on its head by demonetisation. The tendency now is for prices to be increasingly “sticky upward”. The accompanying table (right)...

-Scroll.in The 10,000-megawatt project on the Siang river would ‘submerge the district headquarters of Upper Siang district’. On September 26, a delegation of the Arunachal Pradesh government led by Chief Minister Pema Khandu attended a presentation in Delhi by the Central government think tank Niti Aayog “on [a] proposed Multipurpose River Valley Project for Siang River”. The Siang is the Brahmaputra’s main tributary that connects to the Yarlung Tsangpo, as the Brahmaputra is...