Vivek's Commentary

The world is witnessing a crisis bigger than the previous crisis. The responses from the central bank are incredible and rare.  The monetary tools can be categorized into four main categories. First, today is a short-term interest rate that influences the cost of funds in the system. It also plays an important role as far as signals in the system are concerned. The second tool is lending to financial institutions to manage liquidity. Lending can be targeted to support certain segments. The third tool is asset purchases (assets can vary from government bonds to private sector securities like corporate bonds, equity, etc. This again can affect the liquidity. The fourth tool is regulation and supervision. The regulations like reserve requirements, capital, liquidity requirements can affect the markets.  In the advanced economies interest rate is close to zero lower bound. And that puts restriction over the central bank as far as the interest rate is concerned. As far as the Reser...

In the previous article, we discussed the point mention in The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Ordinance, 2020. We will continue the previous discussion.  1) Seeds Before continuing the previous discussion, let's discuss about Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Act, 2001. The main aim of this act was to protect the plant varieties, the rights of farmers, and plant breeders so that they can be encouraged to develop new varieties of plants. This is very important as it upholds the farmers' right to save, use, exchange the seeds as well as gives the right to claim special forms of intellectual property rights over their varieties. Now keep this thing in mind and discuss the experience of contract farming in India. The potato contract farming by Pepsico in Hoshiarpur District of Punjab mentioned the following terms and conditions:  Parent seed of a certain variety, which is the exclusive property of  Pepsi...