July is a month when we need to remind ourselves how reforms have changed India since 1991, from vulnerability to resilience, whether to external shocks (say, oil) or internal ones (droughts). In 2009, we witnessed the worst drought since 1972, yet the agricultural growth rate stayed positive (0.4%), nor did we resort to any major cereal imports. And in 2010-11, we are likely to have a record harvest of 241 million...

The government’s latest estimates show that foodgrain production in the crop year 2010-11 rose sharply by 10.75% to a record 241.56 million tonnes (mt), a move that could potentially have a dampening effect on inflationary expectations. The impressive increase led by wheat, maize and pulses is revealed in the final estimates for 2010-11, and is partially explained by the fact that 2009-10 was a drought year. The crop year extends from July...

A perverse, yet novel reason put forward to explain high inflation is that the poor are eating more as they are becoming less poor. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has been extolled for being responsible for higher consumption, which in a way is a vindication of high inflation. The extended logic used here is that if the poor are eating more and we are paying high...

In his fields, Badhia Naval Singh , a farmer tilling 8 bighas of land in the Bagli tehsil in Madhya Pradesh, has been seeing something strange for a while now. Earlier, if he pulled out a tuft of grass, he would see earthworms . "Ab woh dikhna bandh ho gaye hain (they don't show up any longer)," says the 45-yearold . Also, he says, when he ploughed earlier, the soil...

Despite the much-hyped rural consumption boom and all the social sector programmes of the government, the income inequality between the rural and urban consumer widened to 91% in the first five years of the United Progressive Alliance coming to power in 2004. According to the 66th round of the household consumption expenditure survey released by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) on Friday, the per capita expenditure level of the urban...