-Livemint.com The job of policy strategists is always to identify the binding constraints to growth and then try to figure out which policies will help ease them Economists of a certain vintage will remember the old development models in which rapid economic growth was held back by three key constraints. The first was the savings constraint. A poor country such as India could not save enough of its annual national income to sustain...

-Outlook The collection of separate figures for suicides of farmers and farm labour has started in 2014, the year in which there were 5650 farmers committed suicides as against 6710 cases of farm labour suicides. According to the latest figures released by the government, farmer suicides in 2016 have come down to 6351 from 8007 in 2015, a drop of 21 per cent.  Suicides among agricultural labourers, however, have gone up by...

-TheWire.in Mexican economist David Barkin on India's neoliberal economics, growing inequalities, agrarian distress and more. David Barkin is Professor of Economics at the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City. He received his doctorate in economics from Yale University and was awarded the National Prize in Political Economics in 1979 for his analysis of inflation in Mexico. His research has focused on the development of an alternative to the capitalist economic model. In an...

-The New Indian Express In 2017, nearly 40 lakh hectares of agricultural land was impacted because of water woes, resulting in a drop in the area under cultivation for crops. NEW DELHI: With one-third of agriculture activities in India still depending on groundwater for irrigation, the country’s cultivated land is shrinking due to depleting ground water levels and extreme weather conditions. This will impact the agriculture output and may upset the Centre’s...

-The Hindu Business Line Tested across AP, this technique, though devoid of chemicals, has helped boost productivity and cut production costs In the last fortnight, two announcements to revive the sagging farm sector evoked differing responses. While the announcement by the government to hike minimum support price for selected crops generated political noise, a more nuanced approach by NITI Aayog seeking State governments’ support in reducing cost of crop production was...