Vivek's Commentary

Farmers are in Delhi, demanding special session for agricultural issues. To support their protest, I am trying to highlight the main issues through small articles.  Let's first discuss the main highlighted issue: APMC and Prices... The agricultural prices are always debated on every platform.  In 1960s several states passed the Agricultural Product Market Committee act. The main aim of this act was to provide an efficient marketing system and effective infrastructure for marketing of agricultural produce. All produce should be brought to the market yard first and be sold through auction so that farmer would get proper returns. Old APMC act didn’t allow any kind of private player to take part. There was no place for contract farming. But now APMCs act is amended and there is a provision for contract farming. According to the new act, private person, farmers can set up their own market.  However, there are still problems. Agents i.e. middle-men are taking the adva...

Statue of Unity will improve livelihood, promote job creation & tourism: PM Modi Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi in his speech said that the tourist city will be developed and the jobs will be created by the statue of unity. But in India, neither monuments nor so-called tourist cities have created formal jobs. Most of the monuments are not even able to generate the revenue to overcome the expenditure.  Data sources - Press Information Bureau, Government of India, Ministry of Culture Except for Taj Mahal, Agra Fort and Group of monuments, Fatehpur Sikri, other monuments are struggling to generate the revenue. The revenue from Taj Mahaj is highest among all monuments. It was 21,84,88,950 Rs in 2013-14 i.e. around 21 Crore Rupees. For simplicity, let's assume that the statue of unity will generate 21 crore Rupees and so-called tourist cities will generate 41,73,16,987 Rs (It's a total expenditure on all World Heritage Monuments in India in 2013-14. I c...