-The Hindu Business Line Having recovered from their lows touched early or mid-2020, food prices are rising fast. At $574.8 a metric tonne in February 2021, the price of soyabean was 53 per cent higher than the corresponding month of 2020, when the effects of the Covid pandemic were yet to be felt (Chart 1).  Over that period, the price of maize had risen from $168.71 to $245.24 a metric tonne...

-Livemint.com The Centre’s plan to pay off food subsidy arrears is likely to distort our GDP readings for multiple years A puzzle of sorts has arisen—again—in India’s official gross domestic product (GDP) estimates. They don’t meet the smell test. Back in 2015, the Central Statistics Office’s practice of using ‘single deflation’ instead of ‘double deflation’ during a period of falling commodity prices had distorted growth prints, as per our analysis. This time, too,...

-The Indian Express The March 4 letter said that FCI, Zonal Office (N), Noida, has directed that land records are a must for wheat procurement in RMS 2021-22. Jalandhar: The Food Corporation of India’s (FCI) Punjab office on Thursday wrote to the director of food, civil supplies and consumer affairs seeking land records of farmers so as to make direct online payment of Minimum Support Price (MSP) to their bank accounts from...

-Livemint.com * Central and state taxes make up for 60% of the retail selling price of petrol and over 54% of diesel * On 20 February, petrol price was hiked by record 39 paise per litre and diesel by 37 paise a litre Reserve Bank of India governor Shaktikanta Das called for reduced indirect taxes on petrol and diesel to contain the fuel prices at a reasonable level. Petrol and diesel prices in...

-The Hindu To show Indian agriculture as being net taxed to argue for the farm laws has poor conceptual validity Over the past three decades, a major rationale offered in favour of liberalising Indian agriculture was that farmers were “net taxed”. In other words, incomes of farmers were kept artificially lower than what they should have been. It was argued that this “net taxation” existed because protectionist policies deprived farmers of higher...