-Press release from NREGA Sangharsh Morcha For the past five days, hundreds of National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) workers and their supporters from across the country have gathered at Jantar Mantar to demand the implementation of the employment guarantee act in letter and spirit. They are demanding a substantial increase in the NREGA wages, timely payment of wages, implementation of local plans, expansion of existing entitlements and adequate budget for...

-The Indian Express The failure of populist rural credit schemes stems primarily from poor understanding of farm indebtedness in the first place. From the 1970s, a lot of private investment in tube-well irrigation, farm mechanisation and allied agricultural activities took place with bank credit support. After the establishment of National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) in 1982, institutional credit flows not only accelerated, but also exhibited diversification to fund livestock...

-The Indian Express For a country that aims to be a regional power, the data on child nutrition confirms that the situation is abysmal. Save for Bihar, six of the seven states with the highest incidence of stunting, for example, are ruled by the BJP or the BJP and its allies – Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Meghalaya, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Bihar. After an agonising wait of over ten years, the...

-The Indian Express First, it was demonetisation and crop price crash; now it is the collapse of cooperative credit that is hurting farmers during peak kharif operations. For most Maharashtra farmers, drying up of institutional finance for kharif farming operations is what’s really hurting. Nashik (Maharashtra): Last kharif, the Nashik District Central Cooperative Bank (NDCCB) disbursed  Rs 1,608.55 crore of crop loans during April-June, exceeding its target of Rs 1,257.18 crore. This...

-The Hindu Most of the earnings of the average farm household were spent in meeting consumption expenditures. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced a slew of measures in the Union Budget 2017 to boost the agriculture sector. Higher agricultural credit, higher allocation for irrigation projects, a crop insurance scheme and increased allocations for MGNREGA to dig farm ponds were among the measures announced on February 1. But will these help attain the goal...