-The Indian Express Procurement of wheat and rice in the central pool has been increasing over the years, leading to accumulation of Surplus stock of wheat and rice with FCI. As a result, stocks of food grain in the central pool continue to remain much in excess of stocking norms. With Food Corporation of India granaries overflowing, the government is looking to liquidate its grain stocks to prevent damage and minimise...
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Prabhat Patnaik, an economist and former economics professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, interviewed by Kaushal Shroff (The Caravan)
-CaravanMagazine.in In the budget unveiled in July, the finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman ambitiously claimed that India’s economy would hit $5 trillion by 2025. In the weeks that followed, the Central Statistics Office revealed that the gross domestic product growth rate for the April–June quarter fell to a six-year low of five percent; the Reserve Bank of India cleared a surplus transfer of Rs 1.76 lakh crore to the union government; and...
More »Lack of milling facility forces paddy-surplus Tripura to spend crores on rice imports -Debraj Deb
-The Indian Express While procurement has become popular among farmers, insufficient collection is forcing the government to shell out hundreds of crores every year for rice imports while they have got all the rice right at home. Tripura’s BJP-led state government is procuring 10,000 MT paddy from farmers at Minimum Support Price (MSP) starting Monday, even as the Centre’s Food Corporation of India (FCI), which procured paddy for the first time...
More »Is farmer income support a sustainable solution? -Sanjiv Phansalkar
-VillageSquare.in Income support to smallholder farmers is similar to palliative measures like minimum support prices or loan waivers that do not address the problem of an unsustainable population living on a fixed resource base The government in the budget for this year has announced an allocation of Rs 75,000 crore for direct income transfer of Rs 6,000 annually for every farmer who owns less than 2 hectares of land. This amount...
More »Farm subsidy to loan waivers: A race to compensate farmers for their losses -Ashok Gulati
-Financial Express With elections approaching, every party is swearing by farmers and trying to woo them for their votes. The Modi government has already announced a package of Rs 75,000 crore for about 12.6 crore small and marginal farmers. While in absolute terms it looks sizeable, when it is divided by the number of farm families to be covered, it is miniscule—just `6,000 per family per year, which is about 6%...
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