Dealing with surplus: Higher farm production demands new policies

In different parts of the country, farmers have come out and displayed their anger by throwing away their produce, be it milk or onions, because wholesale prices have crashed

When the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government took charge four years ago, it had to deal with almost double-digit inflation, among many other macroeconomic challenges. A significant portion of this inflation was owing to high food prices, and as such, it would seem natural for this government to give priority to allaying the concerns of the consumers and try to contain food inflation. To this end, the government held off announcing sharp increases in minimum support prices for various agricultural commodities and tweaked the trade policy to ensure that there was enough agricultural produce to contain any sharp increase in