-The Hindu Business Line Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) is the new buzzword among development professionals and NGOs — both public and private! Everyone wants to mobilise the community and establish FPOs. Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) is the new buzzword among development professionals and NGOs — both public and private! Everyone wants to mobilise the community and establish FPOs. FPOs present the power of aggregation, farmers’ come together, form an organisation, which collectively buys...

-The Hindu The one lever that the government could have pulled as it watched private investment decline was to step up public investment In a meeting held with the country’s corporate leaders on September 15, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman drew attention to an important aspect of the economy today. She rightly flagged concerns about sluggish corporate investment, despite the government’s business-friendly stance, including a reduction in the corporate tax. The reduction, effected...

-CounterCurrents.org Protection of the Ganga river is one of those tasks in which the government can achieve great success with the enthusisastic involvement of people. Then why is it that success has so far proved so elusive? The available data for Varanasi, the most prioritized place for Ganga protection, reveals that in terms of the essential parameters which define acceptable water fit for bathing, the Ganga here remains much more polluted...

-The Hindu Business Line Kerala’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the subject of international conversation about public health systems. Piloting Kerala’s fight against the pandemic is the State’s Health Minister and CPI(M)’s Central Committee member KK Shailaja who speaks exclusively to BusinessLine about the criticality of publicly-run healthcare and how the need of the hour is to nationalise the system. Excerpts: * What are the lessons to be learnt from...

-The Hindu No decision taken yet on which banks will be privatised, Finance Minister says. Fresh from presenting a Budget that represents a clean break from past policies, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman was in Chennai last weekend to hear feedback from industrialists and common citizens. “This is a Budget that was put through the wringer to ensure that every number was credible and achievable and did not reflect over-ambition,” she said,...