Columnists

Shweta Saini

Shweta Saini is a consultant.

MSP for all crops is fiscally unfeasible

Mon, Dec 20, 2021

🔴 Ashok Gulati, Shweta Saini writes: It may be better to use an income policy to directly transfer money into farmers’ accounts.

A high growth plan for Indian agriculture

Mon, Mar 15, 2021

It requires a diversified approach that takes into account peculiarities and constraints of states, investment in infrastructure and linking farmer producer groups with markets.

An answer to rural distress

Mon, Jan 07, 2019

An income transfer policy combined with direct cash transfer is the best way to help the farmer

From Plate to Plough: Maharashtra vs Market

Mon, Sep 03, 2018

State’s decision to make MSP mandatory for traders will lead to chaos. The way forward is to treat farmers as businessmen and facilitate an environment in which they can flourish.

From Plate to Plough: Lean year as a foundation

Mon, Aug 20, 2018

NABARD’s new survey offers a baseline to double farmers’ incomes. But is a survey done in a drought year a reliable yardstick?

From Plate to Plough: Why farmers agitate

Mon, Jun 11, 2018

An efficient and sustainable solution for better prices really lies in ‘getting the markets right’ by overhauling the agri-marketing infrastructure and its associated laws.

From Plate to Plough: Pieces of a market

Mon, May 28, 2018

A single national agriculture market, promised by the BJP in its 2014 manifesto, remains a pipe dream. Can the government reform the broken APMC structure in the last year of its term?

From Plate to Plough: Four years of neglecting farmers

Sun, May 13, 2018

Government is nowhere close to fulfilling the promises made in BJP’s 2014 manifesto — profitability of cultivation has fallen and dominance of Food Corporation of India continues.

From Plate to Plough: Freeing the farm

Mon, Apr 16, 2018

Raising agricultural exports requires the government to unburden policy of consumer bias. A balance should be struck between meeting the needs of food-insecure consumers and income-insecure farmers.

From Plate To Plough: Getting realistic about farm incomes

Tue, Mar 06, 2018

Unless government takes bold decisions on agri-markets, reducing production costs and increasing demand, its goal to double farmers’ incomes by 2022 will remain a pipe-dream.

From Plate to Plough: Seize the crisis

Mon, Aug 29, 2016

Government has the opportunity to rein in food inflation on a sustainable basis.

From plate to plough: Seeds of change

Mon, Aug 15, 2016

PM Modi needs to move from slogans to action to transform agriculture.

Farm incomes: Dreaming to double

Thu, Jul 28, 2016

The Modi government should spell out clearly what it wants to double by 2022 — nominal or real incomes.

From Plate to Plough: With humility, on farmer income

Mon, Jun 20, 2016

NDA’s existing agricultural policies are ill-equipped to achieve the stated goal of doubling them in five years.

From plate to plough: A barren field

Thu, May 26, 2016

NDA government’s plans for agriculture are still to bear fruit.

From Plate to Plough: Raising farmers’ income by 2022

Mon, Mar 28, 2016

The picture is completed by the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (crop insurance) and e-market platform that he is going to launch on April 14.

Bad cure for a racing pulse

Fri, Oct 23, 2015

Scapegoating ‘hoarders’ and ‘speculators’ for the spike in dal prices might have been effective in the 1960s. But today, it is only evidence of a rather sloppy conceptual policy framework.