-Livemint.com Tractor sales have gone up in a year which has seen farmer protests in several states for remunerative crop prices and farm loan waivers, amid lingering effects of demonetisation and GST implementation New Delhi: Domestic tractor sales rose to a record in the first half of the fiscal year, but economists are hesitating to interpret it as a sign that the farm economy has finally turned the corner. Tractor manufacturers sold 363,071...

-Hindustan Times The design of large injections of public funds for India’s agriculture economy needs to be informed with rigorous evaluations on what is effective for higher farm productivity. A wage subsidy for farm-labour is one modification that needs an evaluation, to generate evidence to inform how the MGNREGA policy generates employment when there is need, but without stress to farm production Indian agriculture is witnessing a period of complex socio-economic distress,...

-The Hindu We need to revisit the credit policy with a focus on the outreach of banks and financial inclusion Since Independence, one of the primary objectives of India’s agricultural policy has been to improve farmers’ access to institutional credit and reduce their dependence on informal credit. As informal sources of credit are mostly usurious, the government has improved the flow of adequate credit through the nationalisation of commercial banks, and the...

-Press release from NREGA Sangharsh Morcha The Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by Swaraj Abhiyan in the Supreme Court on the severe drought conditions in the country had drawn the attention of the Court to the inadequate effort of the Central and state governments in implementing the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), amongst other welfare programmes. In its last judgment on issues of MGNREGA workers on 13 May...

-The Indian Express The transition from a regime of ‘downward stickiness’ to ‘upward stickiness’ has relevance beyond economic jargon. Here’s how Agricultural commodity prices in India have traditionally exhibited what economists call “downward stickiness” — resistance to any declines, while rising at the slightest demand-supply imbalance. That conventional wisdom may have been turned on its head by demonetisation. The tendency now is for prices to be increasingly “sticky upward”. The accompanying table (right)...