First food: business of taste
Good Food is First Food. It is not junk food. It is the food that connects nature and nutrition with livelihoods. This food is good for our health; it comes from the rich biodiversity of our regions; it
India
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Loan waiver: Cheer without fear
Holding down inflation and interest rates, energising the production function, pushing investments, saving livelihoods, and raising incomes and consumption became the principal objectives of the Budget. The waiver of farm loans is a means to the accomplishment of these goals. G. Ramachandran First things ought to come first. There is an exaggerated view that the waiver of farm loans is senseless and indefensible. The waiver has been criticised on the grounds that it would vitiate the credit culture and exacerbate moral hazard in banking. The critics have no such views when commercial and industrial loans remain unpaid or are waived and written off. The waiver of farm loans is a wholly sensible and defensible decision. The waiver at its worst estimate is expected to cost the exchequer a big sum of Rs 60,000 crore. But it will most likely trigger an increase in gross domestic product (GDP) of over Rs 3,72,000 crore over the next three years. The exchequer will earn at least Rs 44,000 crore if the tax-to-GDP ratio is 12 per cent. The nominal net loss could at worst be Rs 16,000 crore. But there may be no loss at all. The loss could turn into a sizeable profit. There are three reasons for this optimism. First, the loss to the exchequer would be lower when the other robust stimuli to growth act upon the economy. Second, the waiver would break the logjam in the fallow farmlands. It will put crops back on cultivable lands that have remained fallow. A spurt in output will kill inflation. Third, lower inflation will keep interest rates low. Nonperforming assets of banks will rebound smartly. Therefore, law-abiding taxpayers and conscientious borrowers that repay loans have nothing to fear. Smartly managerial The Finance Minister has acquired a reputation for smart and conscientious fiscal management since 2006. He has managed India's fat fixed costs of running government pragmatically. He has outrun the beastly costs by taking a managerial view of tax revenues. He has stimulated tax inflows by lowering the unit excise duty rates. He has raised the threshold of the service tax. The raising of the personal tax threshold level and the slabs expands incomes that can be allocated to consumption. It expands the size of the indirect tax market as a result. Yet, it ensures that the good times of ordinary people will continue. The cut in excise duties applicable to many consumption goods and consumer durables deserves special attention. Compliant and conscientious The boost to consumption may appear scandalous. But the Finance Minister has stayed steadfastly on course to meet the requirements of the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act (FRBMA). Ernst & Young, a global accounting confirm, has aptly commented that India has
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Wildlife lobby seeks fresh review of Act
In a hardening of stance, some powerful wildlife NGOs and conservationists have written to the Prime Minister against the government implementing the Forest Rights Act without a fresh review. Wildlife NGOs and individuals who are part of the National Board of Wildlife (NBWL), which is headed by the PM, have complained that the government has not set up a committee to review the Act. "The decision taken at the fourth meeting to have the adverse impacts of the Forest Rights Act looked into by a subcommittee (of the NBWL) was totally ignored (by the environment ministry) and no such sub-committee has been formed,' the letter says. While the members have claimed the PM had agreed to a review, the minutes of the meeting record that a committee would be formed merely to
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Getting It Right
Loan waiver for farmers is a good beginning M K Venu A former bureaucrat who had worked with finance minister P Chidambaram in 1997 summed up the 2008-09 Budget aptly in the words of Edmund Burke: "Mere parsimony is not economy. Expenses and great expenses may be an essential part in true economy'. The bureaucrat in question, former revenue secretary N K Singh, had then designed one of the most liberal tax amnesty schemes for the urban rich with a view to mainstreaming sources of black money generation. The amnesty programme had later prompted even the Supreme Court to comment that such schemes must not become regular practice. Those were difficult times when a prolonged growth slump in much of Asia had led to sluggish revenue collections year after year. Budget targets were rarely met, if at all. Consequently, the government had to resort to amnesty schemes, in desperation, to collect more revenues. Things have dramatically changed in recent years. Asia is fast becoming the engine of growth, and India is a big part of the story. The government's revenues have soared from about Rs 2,54,000 crore in 2003-04 to Rs 5,85,000 crore in 2007-08, more than doubling in four years. With its coffers overflowing, the UPA government has chosen to embark on a "great expenses' programme. And why not? If you could give amnesty to the rich in difficult times, why not amnesty to the poor, distressed farmers when the coffers are full up? The Rs 60,000 crore farm loan waiver may have some design flaws, but no one today should quarrel with the sentiment that agriculture, and the small farmer, do need a leg-up. Clearly, the distress in the farm sector in recent years has created an adverse political climate for the UPA, which has been a bit shy of selling more aggressively the unprecedented GDP growth India has seen in the past five years. It is obvious that you cannot sell high GDP growth and bulging forex reserves in large parts of rural India which are in distress. This had also become a cause of persistent friction between the Congress and the Left within the UPA alliance. All this while, it would appear, it is this political tension which had resulted in the growing communication gap between the Congress and the Left. This may have had its spillover effect even on the nuclear deal. The Left would seem to have been somewhat assuaged by the Budget proposals. The CPM general secretary Prakash Karat has for the first time welcomed the farm and social sector programmes announced by the finance minister. This may signal a temporary thaw in the relations between the Congress and CPM. There is talk that the nuclear deal may also get revived, and the Left may not do any more than make some routine noises over it. The larger issue is one of creating a conducive atmosphere in the political economy to build a consensus for further reforms that are critical for India's economy to sustain a 9 per cent growth for the next five years. The massive farm loan waiver and higher spending in social sector programmes must be appropriately used now to bring down the political opposition to further reforms which are important to propel India to the next level in the globalisation sweepstakes. The Budget in some ways has signalled a New Deal, in which every section of society has benefited, whether it's the urban middle class or the rural poor. But these benefits must now be accompanied with some obligation to work towards a common goal. The one common objective, with which the CPM must have no quarrel, is promoting higher levels of industrialisation. The CPM has also formally recorded in its party document that rapid industrialisation is necessary and there is an urgent need to move people from low yield agriculture to industry. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh too has been placing repeated emphasis on this. The only caution that needs to be exercised is this process must be conducted in a democratic, bottom-up fashion. This was the prime lesson of Nandigram and Singur. The farm loan waiver must be seen as a purely temporary relief and there must be some programme by which farm families locked in low-yielding, suboptimal farm activity are moved to non-farm sectors. After one loan waiver, there is no point in their getting into another loan to do unremunerative agriculture. This would be a recipe for future fiscal disasters. Some permanent institutional arrangement must be designed by the Centre and states together to ensure that inherently remunerative farm activity gets a boost with technical, marketing and financial support. The other farm families must be encouraged through new skill development programmes to move to the manufacturing sector. This needs to be done in a focused manner. The Left Front government in West Bengal has designed an elaborate scheme, after the farmer protests in Nandigram, which seeks to handhold farm families for years after their shift to manufacturing townships built on their land. If done democratically, this is the only way to design a long-term solution to the problems of India's farm sector. A rapidly globalising economy just cannot afford 60 per cent of its population in agriculture sharing less than 20 per cent of the national income. This will remain the biggest point of tension in our political economy. The massive farm loan waiver in the Budget only addresses the symptom. Much more needs to be done to address the root cause. The Rs 60,000 crore loan waiver, at least, brings the whole issue to the centre stage. That is clearly a plus.
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Physical road connectivity between urban consumption markets to farmlands
Storage infrastructure and setting up processing facilities for our farm products are major issues and need immediate attention of policymakers to accelerate agricultural growth, says former power minister and MP, Suresh P Prabhu LACK of adequate infrastructure in the hinterland and poor connectivity are major reasons behind slow agricultural growth. Better communication infrastructure is urgently required to maximise benefits of scientific innovation in enhancing farm produce. Since there is a limit to expanding the farm land, I strongly believe that there is no alternative but to put together a credible agriculture infrastructure to meet the rising demand in India for foodgrains and other agri-products and also make decisive inroads into the external markets. Access to markets Beginning with physical road connectivity between the urban consumption markets to farmlands, setting up storage facilities to processing facilities for our farm products is one big issue that needs to be tackled by the policymakers in the country. Very often, I have witnessed heated debates in the Parliament on farmers' issues. Inadequate or lack of farm infrastructure is not limited to just India. It is a phenomenon in the entire South Asian region. Massive investments in building this infrastructure in agriculture and related farm-based industries are the only answer as we make efforts to maximise our productivity from the farmlands. Scientific research and technological innovations would make our investments more productive. Billions of dollars need to be set aside for laying rural roads, setting up cold storage, post-harvest processing units, quality and affordable inputs like seeds, fertilisers and water apart from undertaking massive diversification into horticulture, floriculture and allied areas like livestock, poultry development. Insulating Indian agriculture from vagaries of weather is another big challenge as the infrastructure for water storage, smooth flow up to farm-gate apart from ensuring judicious use needs emphatic focus. Only then the double-digit GDP growth envisaged during next five years would be possible. Common concern Farm infrastructure development assumes a lot of significance as the South Asian region led by India is home to 35% of the world's hungry and 40% of the world's poor. About 70% of these people belong to India. The country's borders with other South Asian countries are often porous for flow of agricultural inputs, products and human resources, but its formal trade, particularly its import with its neighbours, is not as intense. Authentic estimates corroborated by FAO figures project that the country's food production will exceed human food demand and sizeable surpluses of cereals, fruits and vegetables, potatoes and milk will be available, which will help strengthen the proposed South Asian Food Bank once the infrastructure bottlenecks are sorted out. As stated earlier, agricultural growth in recent years has thrown new sectors and regions into prominence. Livestock, fisheries, horticulture, specialty enterprises (spices, medicinal, aromatic, organic) and value-added products illustrate this trend. Market-driven diversification, emphasising the role of the private sector, in a global perspective, has become the new paradigm driving future agricultural growth. Alternative instruments and approaches are evolving to transform agriculture and a very important part of this
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Eco-friendly energy efficient project
Leading power equipment manufacturer, OSRAM, on Thursday announced that it had joined hands with the largest German power generation company RWE to launch their first energy efficiency project in India based on the Kyoto Protocol guidelines at a cost of 150 million Euros. Under the programme, high-quality OSRAM energy-saving lamps will be distributed to around 700,000 households in the Vishakhapatnam region in the first phase. The project will be financed exclusively via CO{-2} certificates under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) based on the Kyoto Protocol for reducing CO{-2} emissions in developing and emerging countries, according an official release here. The energy-saving lamps are being distributed by the local power supply company in cooperation with self-help groups. At the same time, ordinary light bulbs will be collected from the households and sent for eco-friendly recycling. In all, this project is likely to save up to 400,000 tonnes of CO{-2}. "The project together with our partner RWE will reduce CO{-2} emissions in India and help the country keep its energy requirements down. It will also give a broad cross-section of population who would not otherwise be able to afford energy-saving lamps the opportunity to save money,' said Wolfgang Gregor of OSRAM.
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The economics of agriculture
When will the political class realise that govt freebies offer no lasting solution?
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Debt relief to farmers
THE Budget 2008-09 was projected long before as a "kisan budget' that would announce relief measures adequate enough to mitigate the misery of our farmers who have been reeling under a debt-trap.
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Trend-setting Budget
The government has made significant allocations to important developmental and social agenda, and yet provided enough stimuli for continued growth.
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Bill for nationwide Metro soon
Chandigarh, Karnataka, Andhra keen on project
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NDA blamed for agrarian distress
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and United Progressive Alliance chairperson Sonia Gandhi virtually launched the Congress party's election campaign here on Sunday with a frontal attack on the BJP-led N