KEY TRENDS   • Oxfam India's 2023 India Supplement report on poverty and inequality in India reveals that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Following the pandemic in 2019, the bottom 50 per cent of the population have continued to see their wealth chipped away. By 2020, their income share was estimated to have fallen to only 13 per cent of the national income and have less than 3...

-The Telegraph The agrarian laws might have been repealed but are we any wiser about what it was that the farmers were so against, what reforms they could do with instead of the ones thrust upon them? Even in retreat over the farm laws, the Modi government adopted the same top-down approach it employed while bringing them in in May 2020. Pleasantly surprised as they were by the Prime Minister’s unexpected announcement,...

-Scroll.in We must remember that there is no one such thing as ‘Indian agriculture’ whenever we discuss reforms. Multiple models need to be discussed. On Monday, Parliament cleared a bill to repeal the three farm laws that had gripped Indian politics for much of the past year. Passed in September 2020, the laws were meant to allow much greater play of corporate capital in Indian agriculture. However, the laws also sparked fears...

-The Indian Express The Centre is within its rights to enact laws promoting barrier-free trade of farm produce (inter- as well as intra-state) and also dismantling stockholding restrictions. But that can be only after the farmer has sold. In November 2019, the Fifteenth Finance Commission submitted its interim report, wherein it proposed special “performance based incentives” to states that carried out agriculture sector reforms. These reforms specifically pertained to their enacting and implementing...

-The Indian Express The state has posted high growth rates in the agricultural sector in recent years, but the growth has been skewed in favour of the state's irrigated parts and a small number of crops. Madhya Pradesh is primarily an agricultural state. One third of its gross state domestic product comes from this sector, half of the state’s area is used for cultivation, and 70 per cent of the total workers...