-The Hindu Business Line There’s room for more awareness and organisation, but the number of people benefiting from fair price shops is growing Poor people in India depend heavily on the public distribution system. A recent survey by the National Council of Applied Economic Research found that more than 90 per cent ration card-holders in Below Poverty Line (BPL) / Priority Households (PHH) and the Antyodaya Anna Yojna category purchase foodgrain at...

-Hindustan Times Parbhani: It took Pandurang Shinde three trips to the weekly Khandoba cattle bazaar in Parbhani, one of the eight drought-hit districts of Marathwada, to find a buyer for his pair of bullocks. After much heckling, he managed to sell his coveted pair at Rs 50,000, half the price at what the animals had cost him. The weekly cattle bazaar, held on Thursdays, at Parbhani taluka is packed these days, full...

-The Hindu The average rural Indian household is a marginal landowner, growing mainly cereals on a small patch of land and reliant on groundwater for irrigation, new official data show. Over 80 per cent of rural households have marginal landholdings of less than one hectare (10,000 square metres) and just seven per cent own more than two hectares, data on household land ownership from the National Sample Survey Office show. Tribal people are...

-The Indian Express There is a worrying dearth of Indian economists working on agriculture today. In his classic Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went, John Kenneth Galbraith observed how the economics profession had a well-defined order of precedence. At the top were the economic theorists and specialists in banking and finance. At the bottom of the hierarchy were agricultural economists. George F. Warren from Cornell University was even worse — a...

-Business Standard India’s growth in agriculture and allied activities has struggled to reach the targeted four per cent average a year in the first three years of the 12th five-year Plan because of a host of factors. The below-average farm growth is widely expected to deepen the crisis in the farm sector. In an interview with Sanjeeb Mukherjee, newly-appointed member of NITI Aayog and eminent agriculture economist Ramesh Chand  said over-reliance...