-Livemint.com The impact of cash crunch on farmers is likely to have a cascading effect on the broader economy in southern India Bengaluru/ Chennai: P.V. Rajappan, a rice farmer in Kerala’s drought-hit Palakkad district, had been planning to drill a borewell to irrigate his next crop. He thought he would be able to do it this year. Rajappan delivered his entire harvest—10,210kg of paddy—to the state-run Civil Supplies Corporation, popularly known as...

-The Indian Express The problem is particularly pronounced in Bardhaman district — known as the rice bowl of Bengal. Kolkata: West Bengal’s agriculture department has estimated that 35 per cent of the monsoon paddy might go waste if not harvested in time, an exercise that has been badly hit with farmers lacking the cash to pay for labour. The estimate is part of an agriculture department report, commissioned to assess the impact...

-The Telegraph Ahmedabad: Samir Shah never had such spare time in his life as an oil mill owner. This is, after all, the peak season when mills buy oil seeds that are available after the harvesting of kharif crops. But the Saurashtra businessman has been sitting idle the past fortnight. There's no cash to do business. The demonetisation drive has left entrepreneurs like him with a shrunken wallet. And farmers don't usually accept...

-The Economic Times Farmers accustomed to decades of government policy failure are willing to bear the pain caused by the government’s decision to recall Rs 500 & 1000 bills, but engineering a systematic failure of the rural cooperative banking sector would be an unpardonable desecration. Earlier rural bank branches were given a step motherly treatment: Rural cooperative bank branches were not replenished with lower denomination currency, while the newer higher denomination notes...

-The Economic Times In a chat with ET Now, Abhijit Sen, Professor, JNU, says this is a whole sector in which there are very large cash demands for production at one or two points in time and this happens to be one. Edited excerpts * The government has hiked MSPs for rabi crop. How do you see the impact of higher MSPs for output and demand for rabi playing out? The increases are normal...