Farmers from across the country are out on Delhi’s streets agitating, as the government begins deliberations for the 2018 budget. It is time to seek solutions to the structural issues that plague the system.
As farmers look for a farmer leader, thoughts turn to Chaudhary Charan Singh, the plain-speaking and contrarian leader. A peasant becoming Prime Minister still resonates across rural India.
Policy disconnect has serious consequences and the centre’s policy of not allowing Punjab to diversify is causing damage to the health of people in faraway Delhi.
India’s khichdi policy for the farm sector, does not make for a healthy broth but deepens the structural mess that can be ignored only to the country’s peril.
The Indian Council of Agriculture Research has long lost it sense of direction and even will to deliver magic in the Indian countryside.
The perils besetting the farm sector should draw attention to the missing contribution of the ICAR, the raison d’être of which is Indian farming.
Using dressed up data and wrong farming economics, sycophants — in the guise of economists — are distorting the reality around the farm sector.
How does one correlate the dramatic ‘doubling of farm incomes’ with the growing farmer agitation across the country?
The Direct Benefit Transfer of Fertiliser Subsidy, though good on paper, is emerging as a mechanism to transfer benefits exclusively to the industry; not the farmer.
The government’s grand vision for a ‘New India’ is at variance with its narrow economic policies; the DBT seems to be all about transferring benefits to the industry.
