-The Economic Times After Gujarat returned the ruling BJP with a slim margin, the chorus of the establishment was "jo jeeta wohi sikandar" (He who wins is the king). It seemed apt, considering that the party retained Prime Minister Narendra Modi's home state, bunking anti-incumbency of 22 years. But opposition wags responded with "jo sikha wohi sikandar", he who learns will be king, in 2019, in the next general elections. Rural Gujarat,...
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New drought manual may aggravate farm distress -Nidhi Jamwal
-VillageSquare.in Strict parameters set by the central government has made it tougher for the states to declare a drought and seek relief funds from New Delhi Mumbai (Maharashtra): The Indian government is leaving no stone unturned to fight the occurrence of drought in the country. The Manual for Drought Management, released in December 2016 by the Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, prescribes “new scientific indices and parameters” for a “more...
More »Hard reality and political compulsions may force a rural-focused budget
Budgetary allocation to a particular sector indicates how much priority the government assigns to that sector as compared to the rest. A preliminary analysis by the Inclusive Media for Change team indicates that the actual expenditure (net of receipts and recoveries) by two of the country’s most important ministries, namely the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare (MoAFW) and the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) was less than 1 percent...
More »Aadhaar is fine to stop some kinds of leakage and corruption. But it is no panacea. -Maitreesh Ghatak
-The Economic Times The art of good governance is through trial and error, figuring out what works where and how, and scaling up from below. Only then can one have a solid foundation. Aadhaar literally means something that holds (dhaaran: to hold). The word is interpreted either as a foundation or base (such as, to a building), or a container (such as, of water), even though given that it is an identity-verifying...
More »Potato portents -Ajay Vir Jakhar
-The Indian Express The crisis in the crop’s prices in two of the four years of the Modi government illustrate that farmers no longer matter to it. Farmers are habitually great raconteurs. My grandfather would often narrate an episode, when he encountered a farmer sitting by a heap of potatoes in the middle of the night. On investigating what compelled the farmer to guard potatoes when there were no buyers, he was...
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