The government should immediately announce a 10% increase in the floor price of cotton and rice to protect farmer incomes if it imposes a ban on the export of these commodities, India's two most economically significant cash crops, according to the Commission of Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP), a body which advises the government on the pricing policy for major farm produce. "Any ban on export is an implicit tax on...

A Gujarat court today convicted 23 of the 46 accused in a 2002 riot case in which a mob torched a house where four families had taken shelter, killing 23 people. The court in Anand district will hand down the sentences on April 12 in the so-calLED “Ode massacre” or “Pirawali massacre”, one of the nine cases probed by the Supreme Court-appointed special investigation team (SIT). This is the third Gujarat riot...

The professional divide on Tendulkar's estimation goes a long way back A committee is being set up to devise yet another methodology to estimate poverty in India. The step has LED to some unhappiness among economists and experts that it amounts to junking the services and competence of an expert like the late Suresh Tendulkar, whose study is sought to be replaced. Under pressure from all sides over its estimate of people...

-IANS The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has gagged at least two of its senior leaders in Chhattisgarh after they slammed their own government for not taking the Comptroller and Auditor General's (CAG) report seriously, sources say.  Top sources in the BJP here said former union minister and Lok Sabha MP Ramesh Bais and the former Lok Sabha MP Karuna Shukla were advised by the party to "restrain" themselves from making public statements...

-The Wall Street Journal These days, Indian policymakers are debating how to create a vast new food entitlement program. There is talk of poor households struggling to cope with high food prices and malnourishment among their children. What you don’t hear much about, however, is the most tragic and outrageous consequence of India’s failure to feed its people adequately: starvation deaths. India is a nation that prides itself on having been self-sufficient in...