-Livemint.com Spending on irrigation, crop insurance to be doubled; e-platform to be developed for farm produce New Delhi: The government is set to double annual spending on irrigation and crop insurance, and develop a national digital platform for farm produce in order to ensure better prices for farmers, as part of a push to reduce rural distress following the first back-to-back drought in India in three decades. “We’re expecting that the new...

-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...

-Frontline The new crop insurance scheme introduced by the NDA government in an election year does not provide for a comprehensive coverage of all crops, against all forms of damage and at all stages of the crop cycle. IN AN election year, it is but natural that incumbent governments will introduce welfare policies and schemes. But the problem is that distribution of such largesse in a neoliberal dispensation can only be...

-Frontline Former psephologist Yogendra Yadav, now a member of the political collective Swaraj Abhiyan, recently toured India’s drought-affected districts. He called it a Samvedna Yatra. During the tour, he took note of the agony in rural areas affected by what he calls “one of the worst droughts in independent India” The drought, according to him, has left farmers and the larger rural community in extreme distress, leading to damaging changes in...

-The Asian Age Is the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) a “living monument” of the failure of the economic policies of the Indian National Congress which has ruled the country for all but roughly 14 years since August 1947? Or is it that the MGNREGA, a law enacted a decade ago which seeks to implement the world’s biggest and most ambitious job creating scheme, one of the few...