Letters: Value crops

With reference to the editorial, "Hopes of bumper harvest" (August 15), I must admit that I came across high quality commentary on issues concerning an area like agriculture and rural development after a long time. I must congratulate your research team for the use of appropriate data, flawless analysis, scholarly inferences and for giving practical directions to the probable public policies in the most likely event of a bumper harvest during Kharif 2016.

But one thing to which we are erroneously falling victim is in trying to establish a disconnect between the "crops segment" and "non-crop segments". In the past when there was service sector-led high overall gross domestic product (GDP) growth coupled with stagnant or even negative farm GDP growth rate, we committed a similar error in assuming that there was a disconnect between the two, and that led to the utter negligence of public sector investment in agriculture and resultant food inflation. Let us never compromise on the value of the crops (grains) segment. It is the foundation of the economy.

Ranjit Kumar Das, Bhubaneswar

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