bidding starts for maharashtra

out today, a small online followup to a story i filed last week — about the finance ministry deciding that India should be split into 20 clusters, and that all public sector banks in each cluster should appoint a common BC for servicing their rural/poor customers.

Fixing India’s Agricultural Soils

Some days ago, agriculture minister Sharad Pawar took most people by surprise when he said the UPA government was planning to redirect India’s fertiliser subsidy towards organic and balanced fertilisers. Time will tell if he was serious. In the meantime, here is a small story I wrote for ET’s website on why this announcement was urgently needed, and what a clutch of dryland agriculture experts say about how India should make this transition.

Also see this and this.

and now for something completely different

i spent a large chunk of sunday reading the first two volumes of jason lutes’ graphic novel called berlin. set in the late nineteen twenties, the books recreate a time in the city when fundamental forces had been unleashed in germany. rearmament was secretly underway. fascism and socialism were competing for the soul of the city. the great depression was about to break out.

one of the characters is a veteran journalist who sees germany hurtling towards disaster but is slowly realising that his words do not have any impact. here is something, a tad more optimistic, a much more strategic way of looking at journalism, that he says in the early parts of the book.

I imagine the daily output of the entire newspaper district. It makes me think of drowning, but I want to be able to see it another way. Instead: human history as a great river, finding its course along the lowest points in the landscape, and each page as a stone. Tossed in without purpose, just to see the splash, thousands of them might raise the water level until it escapes the confines of the riverbed. The water spreads out, the force of the river diminishes, before long, a marsh. But if each stone is placed carefully and with purpose, perhaps something can be built. Not to dam the current, but to divert its course.

(berlin: city of stones, jason lutes).

Ctrl:Alt:Del

Today’s Economic Times carries this story about an unexpectedly large change that is sweeping across the Bank-BC model. The Department of Financial Services, the part of the Finance Ministry which looks after the banking sector, has decided to split the country into 20 clusters and get all public sector banks in that region to work through a common Banking Correspondent company. This radical makeover of the sector is making a bunch of people, including banks, very nervous. They fear this could result in the rise of monopolistic tendencies amongst BC companies. Click here to read more.

A landmark RTI judgement against the MoEF

filed this online story yesterday about a landmark judgement by the central information commission on why the MoEF must release even draft reports to the public under the RTI. extremely well-argued judgement, this one.

a friend turned foe?

Anyone watching the telecast of the 2012-13 budget would have concluded that the Finance Ministry was solidly backing Nandan Nilekani’s Unique Identification Authority of India. The budget speech mentioned Nilekani by name. It mentioned the UID programme ten-odd times. And spoke about how Aadhaar would be used to overhaul existing subsidy regimes in India — from food to fertiliser.

Well. It’s now time to ask if that was the correct conclusion to draw. In an unexpected development, the Department of Financial Services (DFS), the unit of the finance ministry looking after the banking sector, has kicked off its own pilots for biometric authentication. A decision that a senior official in the UIDAI describes as a “purely anti-aadhaar play”.

See here. My story on a surprising development that raises large questions. For one, is this just cussedness by the department? Or is the government starting to create backup plans to Aadhaar so that cash transfers can be set in motion by 2014, Aadhaar or no Aadhaar?

the case of the missing agricultural credit

and now for a question that is puzzling policymakers. over the last 10 years, rbi numbers estimate agri credit has gone up 755%. go with the budget numbers and agri credit has spiked from rs 51,000-odd crore to rs 575,000 crore now. and yet, look at changes in agricultural output, production, expenditure on agri inputs, etc, and you see far, far more modest jumps. yields, for instance, have gone up a modest 18%. it raises a question on where this great avalanche of cash is actually going.

this story out today raises that larger question and advances some possible explanations. it would be great to see more research on this matter, though.