-Economic and Political Weekly   This study reports on a survey of 4,881 users of more than 4,100 works created under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in Maharashtra. It provides evidence that MGNREGA works support agriculture, and benefit a large number of Small and Marginal Farmers. An overwhelming 90% of the respondents considered the works very useful or somewhat useful, while only 8% felt they were useless. Further, most...

-The Times of India KOLKATA: A potato glut and plunging prices have triggered suicides in Bengal's Hooghly, Burdwan and Bankura districts. Hooghly alone reported six of them. Prices have crashed, one kg of the tuber selling for Rs 3 to Rs 4. With the pressure unlikely to ease in the near future, peasants face an uncertain future and are agitating. In 2013, Bengal's farmers reaped a good harvest of 85 lakh tonnes...

-The Financial Express In a column in The Financial Express, ("Time to tweak priority-sector lending", goo.gl/6O8AOL, February 6), the author made a case for "tweaking" priority-sector lending (PSL) norms which largely stipulate that the commercial banks direct credit towards certain vulnerable sectors and target population. Specifically, the article argued for revisiting the sectoral targets and cited a reduction in the share of agriculture sector in GDP as a valid reason...

-Frontline If Budget 2015 is any indication, the Modi government is going beyond what could be called benign neglect of agriculture to policy moves that are likely to harm its viability. IT is scarcely surprising that farmers are upset with the Narendra Modi government. Indeed, the rosy dreams created by that famous campaign advertisement of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), when farmers spoke of the high crop prices and better cultivation conditions...

-Down to Earth Rajasthan's livestock is facing a threat as grazing lands disappear and laws paralyse traditional economic incentives for keepers Livestock has sustained the people of Rajasthan during times of drought or when agriculture was unviable. State government data suggests 80 per cent of rural families in Rajasthan keep livestock in their households, and 35 per cent of the total income of Small and Marginal Farmers comes from dairy and animal...