Pranab Mukherjee, India’s finance minister, put the rural economy at the heart of a national budget on MoNDAy, saying ridding the farm sector of crippling supply bottlenecks would be his “focus” in the coming fiscal year.A market-neutral budget supporting agriculture, welfare schemes and the extension of banking services to more people was designed to dispel any sense that the Congress party-led government was in drift after a series of high...
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For India’s Farmers, a Bare-Bones Drip System by Vikas Bajaj
During a recent trip to a rural part of western India to report on rising food prices, I met two kinds of farmers — those with access to irrigation and those without. The differences between the two were stark. Those with drip irrigation or sprinklers invariably were reaping rich harvests and profits. But the vast majority of India’s farmers fall in the second camp: they water their crops by flooding their...
More »What does Congress stand for? by Arvind Subramanian
Larry Summers, the recently departed Chairman of US President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council, posed the following question before his trip to India last November: “What is the self-perception of the Congress as a political party?” In fact, this broad question provokes three specific ones in the domain of economics. Is the Congress the party of Jagdish Bhagwati or Amartya Sen; Nehru or Indira Gandhi; or Aruna Roy or NaNDAn...
More »Fertilizer subsidy: what is good for the farmer and the farm? by Raghuvansh Prasad Singh
Is the chemical fertilizer-based food production system sustainable? As a result, what happens to the soil and the larger issue of food security? After a raging debate, the government finally decided to hike the chemical fertilizer subsidy, to catch up with spiralling fertilizer prices in the global market. Also, there is talk about bringing urea under the Nutrient Based Subsidy (NBS) system and decontrolling its prices. Obviously, the fertilizer industry...
More »‘Many challenges remain for India's youthful population' by Aarti Dhar
Adolescent girls face nutritional problems than boys of that age: report Having more than 243 million adolescents &NDAsh; the highest in the world &NDAsh; the key challenge that India faces is ensuring the nutritional, health and educational needs of this population, particularly girls. Over the past two decades, rapid economic growth &NDAsh; with real gross domestic product averaging 4.8 per cent between 1990 and 2009 &NDAsh; has lifted millions out of...
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