-The Hindu Wholesale inflation at eight-month low Inflation in December eased at both the retail and wholesale levels with the consumer price index (CPI) coming in at an 18-month low and the wholesale price index (WPI) registering an eight-month low mainly due to falling fuel prices, according to two separate releases by the government on Monday. Growth in the CPI stood at 2.19% in December, down from the 2.33% registered in November. The...

  In its 2014 election manifesto, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), among other things, promised to "take steps to enhance the profitability in agriculture, by ensuring a minimum of 50% profits over the cost of production". In his 2018-19 Union budget speech too, the Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley informed the Parliament that the 2014 election manifesto of the BJP had stated that the farmers should get at least 1.5 times the...

-The Hindu Unless the government is transparent about details, it will be engulfed in yet another controversy In December, the French company Électricité de France (EDF) submitted a “techno-commercial proposal” to the Indian government for the Jaitapur nuclear power project in Maharashtra. The idea of importing six nuclear European Pressurised Reactors (EPRs) was initiated by the United Progressive Alliance government more than a decade ago, but the project had made little progress...

It is being said by economists that unlike the issue of low food production that gripped Indian agriculture for long in the past, the present problem is about farmers not getting remunerative prices against the crops that they are growing. According to farmer leaders, the policymakers are too late to realise that bitter truth. As a result, there is a growing disenchantment in the rural hinterland against the ruling government...

-Hindustan Times In the discourse on agriculture, for instance, farmer suicides are cited as the biggest proof of the agrarian crisis in the country by a large section. India’s political economy discourse is often a prisoner of the dictum that when there is no theory, there is a conspiracy theory. Corruption, rather than an accentuated cyclical shock after the global financial crisis, combined with the poor governance structures in Indian...