Inder Majumdar and Joe Janzen - Joe Janzen - India is an agricultural powerhouse. The country is the world’s single largest producer and consumer of milk and pulses. It is the second largest producer of rice, wheat, sugarcane, and cotton (FAO 2022). In an effort to encourage substantial domestic production, the Indian government provides annual price guidelines for a set of 23 commodities called the Minimum Support Price (MSP). The MSP is intended to provide a price floor that supports farmers producing commodities crucial to domestic food security. Proponents of the MSP claim that without federally mandated price floors, farmers who grow economically important crops would be subject to excessively volatile market prices.
India’s economic growth picked up in the first quarter of this year from the previous three months, but economists have grown pessimistic about the second quarter after a huge second wave of COVID-19 infections hit the nation last month.
GDP grew 1.6 percent in the first quarter compared with the same period last year, mainly driven by manufacturing sector growth, data from the Indian Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation showed yesterday.
<strong>ANNUAL CONTRACTION</strong>
That compared with revised growth of 0.5 percent in the previous three months and 1.0 percent according to a Reuters poll of economists.
The government also revised its annual GDP