-Reuters   PERLE: As a shiny red harvester bounces across the black earth into the first row of sugar cane, excited schoolchildren run after it and several dozen men stand gaping in the wake of its swift progress. It's the first time that Perle, a village on the banks of the Krishna river in Maharashtra state, has seen a machine used for cutting the tough cane. "This machine will harvest my entire field today,"...

-PTI While petrol prices are market-linked, govt fixes LPG, kerosene and diesel rates, which results in huge expenditure on subsidies Making a case for raising prices of diesel, kerosene and LPG, the Reserve Bank today said hike in rates of petroleum products is necessary to arrest fiscal slippages. "Overall from the perspective of vulnerabilities emerging from the fiscal and current account deficits, it is imperative for macroeconomic stability that administered prices of petroleum...

-Economic and Political Weekly   Budget 2012, built yet again at the altar of fiscal fundamentalism, will not convince anybody. In this era of immediate assessment it took just a few minutes for the Union Budget for 2012-13 to be given one or the other negative appellation – “lacklustre”, “anti-growth”, “back to the 1980s”, “without reform” and the like. Such evaluations forget that union budgets have long since ceased to be statements of...

Token relief to individual taxpayers will cost the exchequer Rs. 4,500 crore In a “pragmatic and domestic growth-oriented” budgetary exercise aimed at shoring up investor confidence and investment, Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Friday sought to tap indirect taxes, especially service tax, to rake in an additional Rs. 45,940 crore into his kitty. Presenting the budget for 2012-13 in Parliament, Mr. Mukherjee provided a token relief to individual taxpayers that will cost...

Global wheat harvests may trail demand for a second year, spurring hoarding and further price gains, said the United Nations. “Whenever you get the market as tight as we are now, hoarding becomes widespread,” Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, said in an interview by phone from Rome. Wheat, corn and soybeans soared to the highest levels since 2008 yesterday as a U.S. government report showed...