Liberalising agriculture

The Finance Minister has announced that important liberalisation on domestic trade and storage of food will be done. I have an article in the Business Standard today, Economic freedom in agriculture, which focuses on the decisions in the real economy in agriculture, and the four elements which shape those decisions (warehousing, futures trading, domestic trade, international trade). While the domestic trade problem is a legal puzzle, there are pathways for the Parliament to make progress, drawing upon Article 301 of the Constitution.

Grievance measurement

One important element of consumer protection is the measurement of aggregate statistics about consumer grievance. The existing ways of handling consumer complaints in Indian finance do not yield such data. The article Estimating consumer complaints using Twitter feeds, on The Leap Blog, uses the Twitter API to create some useful statistical measures. This is by Vimal Balasubramaniam, Kusan Biswas, Renuka Sane and Mithila A. Sarah.