-Business Standard Many good ideas for agricultural reform should be in the Budget Shoring up the rural Economy that has been crippled because of two successive droughts is clearly a major focus of the upcoming Budget. This is imperative also to revive rural demand for goods and services to stimulate overall economic growth. But how Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will seek to achieve this feat is hard to predict, though what he...

-Hindustan Times Less than a day before the Railway budget is presented in the parliament, former railways minister Dinesh Trivedi’s allegations against incumbent minister Suresh Prabhu of “fudging numbers” and concealing facts about the organisation’s financial health have surfaced in a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, that also charges Prabhu of copying Trivedi’s earlier budget speech. Citing that the current Operating Ratio (every paisa spent against a rupee earned) had reached...

-Hindustan Times The government’s crop insurance scheme designed to protect 700 million farmers from natural disasters appears to have been overshadowed by Maharashtra’s BJP parliamentarian Gopal Shetty’s alleged description of farmer suicides as a ‘fashion’ and a ‘trend’. Critics have often described the government, which rode to a landslide poll victory in 2014 promising to usher in ‘achhe din’, as ‘pro-corporate’ at the cost of ignoring the farmers. The Narendra Modi-led NDA...

-The Hindu Jan Breman takes a long view of the changes he’s seen in India over half a century. Perhaps no other scholar in the social sciences has studied India’s poor and its informal Economy as intensively as Jan Breman. The sheer temporal span of his research is mind-boggling. He began his study in south Gujarat 15 years after India’s Independence — in 1962. And he was in south Gujarat in...

-The Hindu Business Line The absence of a strong framework can hold up productivity improvements. But GEAC is better than having no regulator at all The clamour for the state to regulate (as against the powers of the legally mandated regulatory agency), field trials of bio-technology seeds for cotton and then mustard, is truly extraordinary. It has serious long-term consequences for the Economy. The challenges to the Genetic Engineering Advisory Council’s powers to regulate the...