-Business Standard Many good ideas for agricultural reform should be in the Budget Shoring up the rural economy that has been crippled because of two successive droughts is clearly a major focus of the upcoming Budget. This is imperative also to revive rural demand for goods and services to stimulate overall economic growth. But how Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will seek to achieve this feat is hard to predict, though what he...

-Livemint.com Overall, we find that social sector investments have in fact increased across all States, except Bihar In February 2015, the Government of India accepted the Fourteenth Finance Commission’s (FFC) recommendation to empower States with greater expenditure discretion. The States’ share in Union taxes, therefore, increased from 32% to 42%. While the move holds the promise to reform India’s centralized, one-size-fits-all approach to financing the social sector, the process adopted by...

-TheHansIndia.com The ongoing drought is fuelling distress migration from districts in Telangana, a trend that was witnessed in the early 2000s. The severe drought conditions for the second consecutive year have led to crop failure, mounting debts, chronic unemployment and failure of the NREGA scheme, especially in the districts of Mahbubnagar, Medak, and Adilabad, forcing large-scale exodus of farmers and others.   The fruits of a people’s movement and the world’s largest anti-poverty...

-Livemint.com Spending on irrigation, crop insurance to be doubled; e-platform to be developed for farm produce New Delhi: The government is set to double annual spending on irrigation and crop insurance, and develop a national digital platform for farm produce in order to ensure better prices for farmers, as part of a push to reduce rural distress following the first back-to-back drought in India in three decades. “We’re expecting that the new...

-Hindustan Times Bhubaneswar/ Dongargarh: PM Narendra Modi wooed rural India on Sunday, inaugurating a rural-urban or Rurban mission at Dongargarh in Chhattisgarh and exhorting Odisha farmers to sign up for his government’s crop insurance scheme. The Shyama Prasad Mukherji Rurban Scheme, aimed at improving basic infrastructure, was launched from the Maoist-hit district of Rajnandgaon. “When we talk of smart cities, why can’t we talk of smart villages? The villages in our country...