-Hindustan Times India’s obsession with keeping food prices low, even when there’s no inflationary pressure, has long hurt farm incomes Farming is gloriously uncertain, thanks not just to uncertain weather, but also unpredictable policies. Let’s zoom into the finances of Bhupinder Pal Singh, a horticulturist from Babbain, a village in Haryana, a state that counts itself among the first places where India’s Green Revolution of 1960s began. In good years, Singh would earn...

Almost one in every five suicides in the world is committed by self-poisoning with pesticide, which mostly occur in rural, agricultural areas of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), states a new publication entitled 'Preventing Suicide: A resource for pesticide registrars and regulators'. Published jointly by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the booklet says that the adoption of green revolution technology...

-CounterCurrents.org The single most important aspect of the Indian economy is its very large black economy. In fact, it impacts not just the economic aspect of society but also its social and political facets. All the macroeconomic variables like, growth rate of the economy, inflation and fiscal policies are affected by the black economy. The microeconomic variables like education, health, drinking water and other services received by the citizens are also...

-The Telegraph More than half of the country's small and marginal farmers continue to be left out of the ambit of formal finance A recent report by the Reserve Bank of India found that despite a plethora of schemes aimed at financial inclusion, only 40.9 per cent of small and marginal farmers have so far been covered by the banking system. Small and marginal farmers are defined as those with operational land...

-The Hindu Stimulus measure to link pay to consumer price index with annual revision. Staring at a slump in rural demand and a slowdown in the rural economy, the Centre plans to inject more money into the UPA’s flagship Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme by linking wages under the Act to an updated inflation index, which will be revised annually. It hopes this will increase wages, thus increasing...