At a time when political parties are competing with one another to come up with tall promises on impressive farm loan waivers, 13 eminent economists, including former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan and current International Monetary Fund (IMF) Chief Economist Gita Gopinath, have asked the political establishment not to resort to these populist tricks.
A group of these economists, including Abhijit Banerjee, E Somanathan, Amartya Lahiri, Rohini Pande and Karthik Muralidharan, however, endorsed the Telangana model of upfront cash support at the time of sowing — the Rythu Bandhu scheme — to cure farm distress. Telangana is the first and only state