KANAK KANTI BAGCHI

Dairy sector plays a vital role in the case of a nation’s food supply, engagement of rural workforce etc. Milk production, consumption and per capita availability in India have been increasing rapidly. Some of the challenges in dairy sector are pricing, low milk productivity due to intrinsic (low genetic potential) and extrinsic (poor nutrition/feed management, ineffective veterinary and inefficient execution of breed improvement programmes), shortage of feed/fodder and organized private sector. Access to technological innovations, improvement in infrastructural etc have been quite significant to give a strong boost to dairy development. Government has adopted several schemes for improving milk quality and quantity. All the dairy related variables are mostly pair-wise significantly positively correlated. With the help of ‘Dendrogram’, Indian states have been clustered into three clusters namely ‘High’, ‘Moderate’ and ‘Low’. Some policy recommendations for strengthening dairy sector ...

Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) Energy Research Co-operation Platform (ERCP) is an international program for developing energy-based sustainable development and sharing advanced energy technologies. BRICS is a heterogeneous club of nations having around a quarter of GDP, supplyling energy products to 40 percent of the world's population. The central objectives of the study are (a) the overall production consumption gap in energy use, (b) details of energy production, consumption; total proved reserves, import, export of energy, growth rate of energy consumption, (c) associations among energy use, demographic, socio-economic and environmental aspects and (d) policy measures undertaken to reduce energy gap along with pathways to the low-carbon environment. The study is based on the secondary data on (a) energy proved reserves, production and consumption for the period 2011-2021, (b) associated demographic, socio-economic, and environment related data obtaine...

The present paper has analyzed the mechanism by which farmers try to cope with the supply-demand gap of agricultural labourers during busy agricultural seasons in the face of growing shortage of agricultural labourers. The traditional mechanism of patron-client relationship between farmers and agricultural labourers has been dealt with in this regard. In this paper an attempt has been made to find answer to the following questions: What is the degree of attachment of the agricultural labourers with the employer? Is there any patron-client relationship between the employer and the employee? How effective is this relationship as a coping mechanism to mitigate the problem of supply-demand gap of agricultural labourers? The paper is based on a micro level study conducted in six villages of Uttar Dinajpur district, a predominantly agricultural and backward district of West Bengal. The study has suggested that to cope with the situation of supplydemand gap of farm labour, there is no othe...

Regional imbalances in a country may be natural due to unequal distribution of natural resources and/or man-made in the sense of neglect of some regions and preference for others for investment and infrastructural facilities. India's successive Five Year Plans have stressed the need to develop backward regions of the country. In promoting regional balanced development, public sector enterprises were located in backward areas of the country during the early phase of economic planning. In spite of pro-backward areas policies and programmes, considerable economic and social inequalities exist among different States of India, as reflected in differences in per capita State Domestic Product. While income growth performance has diverged, there is welcome evidence of some convergence in education and health indicators across the states. This book contains 14 research papers authored by experts on the subject. They provide deep insights into the various dimensions of inter-state and int...

Health care in India is financed through out-of-pocket payments of individuals, central and state government tax revenues, payments from employers, external aid, private sector profits and other sources. National health accounts reveal that the government sector (central, state and local) together account for around 20% of the total health expenditures (representing around 1% of GDP – among the lowest in the world), external aid via voluntary sector for 2% and 78% take the form of out-of-pocket payments – one of the highest percentages of the world. In spite of a government owned free healthcare delivery chain, 64% of the poorest population in India is indebted every year to pay for the medical care. 92% of the Indian workforces working in the informal sector do not have any kind of insurance (Basu, 2011). The elderly population is mostly residing in the rural areas are poor, and if they are in workforce, most of them belong to the informal sector. Governments in the world are reali...

Use of synthetic inputs like Chemical fertilizer, pesticide, growth regulators etc. is prohibited rather production process will relies mainly on organic sources to maintain soil health, plant nutrients and minimize insects, weeds and other pests. Rice produced in West Bengal are mainly three types; Aus, Amon and Boro. Amon which is cultivated in Rainy season does not require excessive use of chemical ingredients. But Boro rice cultivation which also known as high yielding cropping is highly associated with synthetic inputs available in the market. It has found that productivity of Amon rice has been decreasing gradually after cultivating Boro rice on the same land. After investigation the land by the Agriculture Department it has noticed that health of soil has been deteriorated for Boro rice cultivation and natural productivity of soil has been decreasing slowly. As Amon rice is adequate for survival most of the farmers are not interested to cultivate Boro rice. After farming this...

The paper has studied the phenomenon of out-migration of agricultural labourers which has caused a decline in the supply of labourers to the agriculture sector, particularly during the major farm operations. This has led to an increase in the wages of agricultural labourers, which has escalated the cost of cultivation. Introduction of MGNREGA has not been successful in reducing rural out-migration from the study area. The study has also made some suggestions to improve the standard of living of migrant agricultural labourers. These include: (i) creation of employment opportunities at the local level, (ii) strengthening of non-farm sector in the study area, (iii) expansion of irrigation facilities and area under high-yielding varieties, (iv) adoption of selective mechanization and crop diversification to meet the supply-demand gap of agricultural labourers.

This paper analyses the policy of reservation for lower castes in India. This policy is similar to that of affirmative action in the United States. The paper provides a brief overview of the caste system and discusses the types of groups that are eligible for reservation, based on data from government reports. The stance of this paper is that affirmative action has not benefited the lower castes due to contextual factors like low school enrolment and completion rates, and high dropout and failure rates. Also, continuous addition of more and more castes to the fold of reserved categories has diluted the positive impact of the reservation policy. This paper suggests that under-representation of any social group in educational institutions should be assessed with reference to sub-populations of secondary school completers and argues that, unlike Scheduled Castes and Tribes, Other Backward Castes are not markedly under-represented. Hence, the 27% quota declared by the government recently is not justified. The paper also highlights social, pedagogic, psychological and political issues involved in the policy of reservation, and suggests that quotas should be based on economic criteria rather than on caste considerations.