-Livemint.com It is not possible to provide ‘maximum governance’ with ‘minimum government’. We need ‘good government’ for ‘good governance’, says Deepak Nayyar The erstwhile Planning Commission closed down soon after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the decision on 15 August 2014. Its demise was attributable partly to the ideological belief that planning is passé in this age of markets and globalization and partly to its poor performance combined with growing irrelevance. The...

-TheWire.in Agriculture in the state needs a new paradigm, one that acknowledges the scarcity of interlinked resources and the costs of their use. Recently, experts from Punjab Agricultural University advised farmers in the state to reduce the area taken up by the cultivation of basmati, predicting a crash in basmati prices due to huge carryover stock. Last year, the state produced 18 million tonnes of paddy and contributed a record 9.4 million...

-Livemint.com New Delhi: Back from a walk through drought-affected parts of the country, Yogendra Yadav, political scientist and co-founder of non-profit Swaraj Abhiyan, speaks on state compliance of Supreme Court orders, a booming private water market in Marathwada, and why farmer movements are weakest at a time when agrarian distress is at its peak. Edited excerpts from an interview: * You just came back from a trip to Bundelkhand and Marathwada. What...

-Business Standard The first two years of the Narendra Modi government were marked by big announcements that will take their time to materialise. The one sector that is unfazed by slogans is agriculture. The sector is crippled by back-to-back droughts coupled with a record fall in farm prices. A slump in global markets meant that agriculture exports, which could provide farmers alternative revenue, dried up. Agriculture and processed food exports from India...

-The Indian Express NDA government’s plans for agriculture are still to bear fruit As the Modi government celebrates two years in office, any review of its functioning will be incomplete without examining its record on the farm front. In the two years (FY15 and FY16), while the economy grew at 7.2 per cent and 7.6 per cent respectively, agriculture and the allied sector grew at -0.2 per cent and 1.1 per cent....