-Financial Express Trade and World Trade Organisation (WTO) discussions thrive on perception. Recent actions by the US seek to portray India as flouting WTO rules and distorting the global market by providing huge subsidies to cotton. Left unchallenged, the hypocrisy of the US narrative on cotton could sway WTO members, particularly the cotton-producing African countries. So, what is the fracas on India’s cotton subsidies all about? Shorn of legalese, the US has...

It is being said by economists that unlike the issue of low food production that gripped Indian agriculture for long in the past, the present problem is about farmers not getting remunerative prices against the crops that they are growing. According to farmer leaders, the policymakers are too late to realise that bitter truth. As a result, there is a growing disenchantment in the rural hinterland against the ruling government...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: After an initial target of six crore rural and 1.5 crore urban households, the Jan Dhan scheme for the unbanked has touched 33.5 crore accounts of which 25.6 crore are “operative” while the deposits in the accounts add up to a substantial 85,494 crore. With the government’s focus shifting from “every household” to “every unbanked adult”, the PM Jan Dhan Yojana is offering an enhanced overdraft...

-Livemint.com Some perspectives on the issue seem to paper over the problem and get into comparisons There is much discourse on both the issue of agrarian distress and farmer suicides. However, there have been some arguments that seem to paper over the problem and get into comparisons—that the people who committed suicide just happened to be farmers; that they were not poor; that (as argued by Shamika Ravi of Brookings India) the...

-Hindustan Times In the discourse on agriculture, for instance, farmer suicides are cited as the biggest proof of the agrarian crisis in the country by a large section. India’s political economy discourse is often a prisoner of the dictum that when there is no theory, there is a conspiracy theory. Corruption, rather than an accentuated cyclical shock after the global financial crisis, combined with the poor governance structures in Indian...