-The Indian Express It is important to evaluate the consequences of the Centre’s agriculture policy. With elections around the corner, it’s too late for a course correction of the farm sector, but it’s an opportune time to document the unintended consequences of half-baked policies for the next five years. Otherwise, the momentum of existing policies will continue to feed rural economic misery. Agriculture GDP growth plummeted just as India’s agricultural trade surplus,...

-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...

-PTI The US has alleged that India is providing massive subsidies to its farmers producing rice and wheat and said that other countries need to be concerned about New Delhi's "trade distorting policy". Chief Agricultural Negotiator Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) Gregory Doud made the comments during a Congressional hearing Thursday. "Every rice- or wheat-producing country around the world should be concerned about the trade effects of India's trade distorting domestic...

-Economic and Political Weekly Are the ongoing debates on solutions to crop residue burning marred by policy confusion? While bio-compressed natural gas and ethanol producers want farmers to collect paddy straw from their farms to be supplied to plant locations, another lobby of machine sellers wants the straw to be processed in the fields itself. Would the success of one commercial proposition lead to the failure of the other? Please click here...

-The Hindu India’s GDP growth continues to be powered by consumption, not investments A question being raised about the GDP estimates for the first quarter of this year (April-June) is: How should 8.2% GDP growth be interpreted in, or reconciled with, the overall context of some of the pronounced trends in the economy? These include the depreciating rupee, rising bank bad loans, or non-performing assets (NPAs), a trade deficit that has shot...