-PTI About Rs. 1.47 lakh crore of agricultural loans are outstanding in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh Asian Development Bank (ADB) Country Director Kenichi Yokoyama Friday said farm loan waivers were against economic principles and cannot effectively address the agrarian distress. Yokoyama also advocated for direct transfer of funds to targeted beneficiaries as it would cut down leakages. On farm loan waiver, he said most of the people are sceptical about it as an...

-News18.com Acclaimed journalist and Founder-Editor of the People’s Archive of Rural India, P Sainath attributes the existential crisis confronting India’s agrarian society to macro-economic policies set in motion 25 years ago. Talking to Anuradha SenGupta, Sainath makes a case for state intervention in agriculture and says the Modi government, with its shifting positions and policies like demonetisation has only aggravated the assault on agrarian livelihoods. Dismissing the buzz about imminent new initiatives...

-The Hindu Instead of addressing inequality, the 10% quota for economically weaker SECtions creates huge anxieties If the number of demands for implementing reforms is any guide, India’s reservation system is clearly in disarray. However, it is unlikely that the recently passed Constitution (124th Amendment) Bill, 2019, creating a 10% quota for the economically weaker SECtions (EWS), will serve as anything more than a band-aid. Given the deep inequalities prevalent in access to...

-Financial Express Forget the fanfare about the PM-AASHA scheme that is designed to lend greater price support to farmers, procurement of pulses and oilseeds by the public SECtor is likely to drop by more than a third in the kharif 2018 season from the year-ago period. The decline in procurement comes after two conSECutive kharif seasons in which it surged and reached a critical mass, compared with very small quantities earlier. Just...

-The Hindu In case of loan in both cooperative and commercial banks, the former qualifies for waiver Bengaluru: The intensive de-duplication work to identity farmers eligible for loan waiver is expected to identify at least 7 lakh people who have loans in both cooperative SECtor and commercial banks, resulting in saving of at least Rs.6,000 crore to the State exchequer. A farmer will be eligible for loan waiver from one of the...