-The Hindu Business Line How malnourished tribal adults come to have the ‘rich man’s disease’ About 50 km from Bilaspur town, a narrow road to the left leads to the Achanakmar Tiger Reserve in neighbouring Lormi district of Chhattisgarh. The Reserve is also home to 13,568 tribals in 40 hamlets inside the protected area. As one ventures deeper into the jungles, paintings across walls of tribals’ homes hailing Chief Minister Raman Singh’s benevolence...

-Livemint.com Loan waivers and electricity subsidies are band-aids at best; a deeper transformation is needed The past few days have neatly summed up the scale and nature of the challenges facing India’s agriculture sector. First, the provisional agriculture census 2015-16 showed that landholdings have continued their decades-long trend of fragmentation, leading to a further rise in the proportion of small and marginal farmers. Then, 30,000 farmers, who had started their march from...

-Livemint.com Despite several steps taken by the government, it is not possible to double farm incomes by 2022, due to the dismal agriculture growth rates in recent past, say agriculture economists On 13 September, Gyan Singh, a 28-year-old young farmer from Seoni district in Madhya Pradesh, began a week- long journey, first from his village to the state capital of Bhopal, and then in a cramped general compartment of an express train...

-Firstpost.com Ludhiana: Free meals, payment in advance, free liquor to ease aching limbs after a hard day’s work. Migrant labour in Punjab, mainly from Bihar, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, the mainstay of the state’s agriculture sector, has never had it so good. The problem, however, is the decreasing availability of this labour. Ask Baljinder Singh, a farmer with a 10-acre holding in Dakha village. Come sowing season in mid-June, Baljinder...

-National Herald Maitreesh Ghatak, Professor of Economics at London School of Economics, in an interview to Tathagata Bhattacharya says the government has failed on many counts At the end of the day, it is growth and employment generation via new investment that is key to long-term economic progress. Various welfare schemes are a way of providing a social safety net to the poor in the short-run. It is performance along these two...