-The Hindu Industry is pinning hopes on steps by government on scrappage policy for vehicles and GST rate cut to spur tyre demand While the replacement cycle till now has helped the tyre industry to mitigate the impact of the severe demand slowdown in the automobile sector, the segment — which accounts for about 50% of the tyre market — has started to fill the pinch. While the sector is somewhat hopeful of...

-The Indian Express Trucks carrying sugarcane were stopped on the Pune-Bengaluru highway near Tandulwadi in Sangli districts, bringing traffic to a halt. Kohlapur: Harvesting and transportation of sugarcane in western Maharashtra remained paralysed for the third day on Sunday due to a protest by farmers against sugar mills over partial payment of dues. Led by Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghthana, a prominent organisation of farmers in this region, the farmers in the sugarcane heartland...

-The Indian Express There is a worrying dearth of Indian economists working on agriculture today. In his classic Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went, John Kenneth Galbraith observed how the economics profession had a well-defined order of precedence. At the top were the economic theorists and specialists in banking and finance. At the bottom of the hierarchy were agricultural economists. George F. Warren from Cornell University was even worse — a...

-Live Mint The absence of genuine competition at mandis and numerous transaction charges are distorting onion prices The joke doing the rounds today is that the spike in onion prices has been a great equalizer, bringing parity between the price of a bottle of beer and a kilo of onion. The humble vegetable has also found pride of place as a gift item to customers at a tyre shop in Jamshedpur,...

Singapore spot market, not production costs, driving Indian petrol price Have you ever wondered why when petrol prices go up or down they do so uniformly across the retail outlets of the three oil marketing companies — Indian Oil, Hindustan Petroleum and Bharat Petroleum? If they are three different companies with their own refineries and distribution systems, then surely their costs and selling prices must be different? Welcome to the strange world...