-The Hans India It is official now. New data released by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) for 2013 show that the agrarian distress in rural India is continuing, and even intensifying for small and marginal farmers. In the last decade, there has been much talk on inclusive growth, revival of growth rates in agriculture, higher public investment in agriculture and the doubling of agricultural credit. Yet, the new data show...
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The great forgetting -Himanshu
-The Indian Express The Situation Assessment Survey (SAS) of agricultural households, released last week by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), is the second one ever to be done. The SAS of 2003 was necessitated by the agrarian crisis of the time. Farmer suicides had reached a peak, and the reference year for the survey, 2002-2003, had seen severe drought. The agricultural sector was in crisis, with growth rates slowing to...
More »Wither Away the Pressure on India's Patent Law -Saradindu Bhaduri
-Vikalp Once again, India is under pressure from the US to revise its patent law. Anyone familiar with the activities of the United States Trade Representatives (USTR) would know that this is nothing new. It has been among the USTR's primary mandates to use trade restrictions in order to persuade (to put it mildly) countries to strengthen their IPR laws. There is, however, a qualitative difference between the actions it has...
More »No consensus over fundings, Swachh Bharat fails to go beyond photo-ops -Moushumi Das Gupta
-The Hindustan Times The urban leg of Swachh Bharat Mission could be going to the cleaners as the Centre and the states have yet to clean up their act on the funding pattern to sustain the Rs. 62,009 crore programme. The mission launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than two months ago to encourage cleanliness in cities and to build loos to discourage defecation in the open in urban India is...
More »No conditions apply -Renana Jhabvala
-The Indian Express Cash in the hands of the poor can transform their lives. With bank accounts and an Aadhaar card for all becoming a reality, it is possible to transfer money directly to the poor and check middlemen who siphon away funds. Cash transfers (CTs) come in many forms. They may be conditional or unconditional, selective or non-selective, targeted or universal. Some types of CT are as susceptible to misuse as...
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