The state government has proposed to spend more than Rs7,300 crore on the ailing agriculture sector — in desperate need of assistance after registering negative growth in the previous financial year — and on irrigation. However, this may not translate into direct assistance to farmers. Moreover, this year’s state budget continued to neglect dry land farming – which is of serious concern in view of erratic weather conditions – and has...

The wages under the government's flagship rural employment scheme have risen following adjustments for price rise, creating apprehension that this may add to the inflationary pressures by making farming more expensive.  The government had early last year benchmarked wages under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act to retail inflation to ensure a real wage of Rs 100 a day to workers seeking employment under the scheme.  Under the first such...

Methodology error, intentionally manipulated data of poor quality and perilous local level political partiality is making the life of poor miserable and proved time and again that ‘any initiative for the poor tends to be a poor initiative.’ The erroneous way of assessing multi-dimensional indicators for locating the poor without making any distinction between facilities self-created by someone against facilities created through government schemes is nothing but an attempt to hide...

The Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) has warned against the increasing leasing and buying of millions of hectares of farmlands in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America for food and fuel production. This land is being leased to private investors and sovereign wealth funds with no explicit legal agreement on how water will be used on these farmlands. The World Bank has estimated that over 56 million hectares of land in Africa...

Inequality in India is worsening and clearly following the US pattern India is a “relatively low-income inequality country” – to borrow an expression from a World Bank publication – when compared to China or Brazil, but there is no doubt that disparities have been widening of late. Planning Commission officials have admitted that inequality has risen in the first decade of the new millennium, although the factors responsible for it need...