P.V. Satheesh, founder and Executive Director of the Deccan Development Society passed away on 19 March, 2023. Periyapatna Venkatasubbaiah Satheesh – P.V. Satheesh to friends – was born in Mysore in 1945. He studied mass communication and television production at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication and the Film and Television Institute of India. He joined Doordarshan as a senior producer and worked on programming related to rural development and...

When one of the three farm laws i.e., The Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020 was enacted last year, it was argued by its proponents that the legislation would allow the farmers to sell their produce (and the traders to purchase that produce) outside the Agricultural Produce Market Committee-APMC mandis after crop harvesting. In a way, that particular piece of legislation was enacted to end the...

-The Hindu Business Line Farmers may soon be able to sell their harvested produce at farmgate, with the government adding new features on the electronic National Agriculture Market (eNAM) that bypasses the need for taking the produce to wholesale mandis. Agriculture Ministry on Thursday updated eNAM platform by adding two new software modules that would recognise trade from recognised warehouses using electronic negotiable warehouse receipts (eNWRs) and allow farmer producer organisations to...

-The Hindu Business Line Mumbai: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s advice to State governments to dismantle the Agricultural Produce Market Committees and move on to eNAM (electronic National Agriculture Market) has raised many eyebrows as the three-year-old nascent online platform is still facing teething troubles. Addressing the sixth World Congress on Rural and Agricultural Finance earlier this week, Sitharaman said, “I want to place emphasis on eNAM. We are trying to get the...

-Economic and Political Weekly In the wake of the central government’s minimum support prices hike for kharif 2018–19, the state government in Madhya Pradesh implemented a variant of the deficiency payments system called the Bhavantar Bhugtan Yojana for compensating the farmers when market prices fell below MSP. Besides the problems of long delays in payments to farmers, large transaction costs that farmers incurred due to multiple registrations, and the disposal of...