As India moves from regulations and controls to a total lockdown, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the economy is becoming ever more acute. The Indian economy, which was already facing a sharp downturn by the end of 2019, will surely record an extraordinarily poor growth rate for the months of March, April, and May 2020.
Women’s Access to Banking in India: Policy Context, Trends, and Predictors
There has been a gradual increase in women’s share in bank credit in India in recent years. However, the increase in men’s share has been greater, rendering a widening gender gap.
Randomised Controlled Trials and Non-Randomised Politics: What Makes for Good Policy?
The 2019 Nobel Prize in economics for the proponents of Randomised Controlled Trials fulfils the discipline’s highest aspiration to mimic the laws and methods of natural sciences to explain social order.
Studying the Rural and Liberal Education
If one runs an internet search for the word “rural” in the Indian undergraduate Sociology curricula, one expects to find multiple occurrences. When the result does not show a single mention of the word, it attracts the attention of an educator and teacher and raises the question as to why the word that dominated not only sociology but the syllabi of social sciences has disappeared.
A Book Review by C. T. Kurien
Socio-Economic Surveys of Three Villages in Tripura: A Study of Agrarian Relations, a book prepared by the Foundation for Agrarian Studies and published by Tulika Books in 2019, has recently been reviewed by the noted economist C. T. Kurien in Frontline magazine.
Fieldwork in An Giang, Vietnam
I have spent about a month in Vietnam studying the present situation of rice cultivation, a sector that has immense importance in the economy of Vietnam.
Comparative Study of Rice Cultivation in Thrissur District and the Mekong River Delta
The Foundation for Agrarian Studies (FAS) is happy to announce a fieldwork grant for a new comparative study on rice cultivation in the kole cultivation areas of Kerala and rice cultivation in An Giang Province in the Mekong Delta in Viet Nam.
Agricultural Policy Impasse and the Way Forward: A Conversation with Vijoo Krishnan
The FAS blog team had a discussion with Vijoo Krishnan, Joint Secretary of the All India Kisan Sabha, on the current agricultural policy environment and implications of policy changes for the peasantry on August 9, 2019 in Bengaluru.
Good Diets in the Asia-Pacific Region: Three Countries Score Top Marks
A new study by the regional office of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Bangkok, Dynamic Development, Shifting Demographics, Changing Diets, has put together data on trends and key changes in agriculture and nutrition in the Asia-Pacific region.
The Fact/Fiction of Indian Agriculture
At a time when the economics of agriculture has been ousted from the economics curricula in India, it is heartening to see agrarian issues occupying a central position in recent books of fiction. In this blog, I review Kota Neelima’s Death of a Moneylender (2016, Penguin, Gurgaon).