An army of public representatives assembled at their designated spot
Visakhapatnam: A few blocks away from the main venue at RK Beach where Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu and Deputy Chief Minister K Pawan Kalyan are going to participate in International Yoga Day, public representatives settle to do asanas on the mats.
As part of the IYD- 2025 celebrations, public representatives assembled near Kalimata temple in Visakhapatnam on Saturday morning.
Wearing white Yogandhra T-shirts and extending their support to the massive event, Home Minister Vangalapudi Anitha, Tribal Minister Sandhya Rani, Agriculture Minister K.Atchannaidu, MLAs Bandaru Satyanarayan Murthy, Sundarapu Vijay Kumar, Panchakarla Ramesh Babu, Konathala Rama Krishna and P. Vishnu Kumar Raju, MLC Vepada Chiranjeevi Rao reached the compartment a few blocks away from the main stage.
The event is all set to commence shortly soon after the arrival of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu and Deputy Chief Minister K. Pawan Kalyan.
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Closer home, India trails even Sri Lanka ($14,970) and Bhutan ($17,735), though it remains ahead of Pakistan ($6,950.5) and Bangladesh ($10,261.1) in 2025 (IMF). Nevertheless, the macroeconomic milestones are indeed impressive and India needs to stay the course. But there is always one question associated with such macro trends: How far is this growth inclusive? The Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, has shown only modest shifts over the past two decades. In 2004, it was 0.34, in 2014 it edged up slightly to 0.35 and dropped to 0.33 in 2021, indicating moderate inequality in India, according to the World Bank. For inclusive growth, the performance of agriculture — employing the largest share of the workforce (46.1 per cent in 2023–24, according to PLFS) — is crucial. Despite consecutive droughts in 2014–15 and 2015–16, agriculture GDP under the Modi government grew at an average annual rate of 4 per cent (FY15–FY25), surpassing the 3.5 per cent (FY05–FY14) growth under the UPA tenure — which also witnessed a major drought in 2009–10. On the welfare front, the Modi government has spent a lot of resources to uplift the poor and farming community — this includes almost-free staples, rice or wheat, subsidised housing, and supporting farmers with the PM-KISAN direct income support scheme, and a near freeze on urea prices. All this has led to a sharp reduction in extreme poverty (head count ratio) at $3 per day (2021 PPP) — from 27.1 per cent in 2011 to just 5.3 per cent in 2022. The 80 per cent drop marks one of the fastest and most significant fall in poverty that India has achieved in any period since 1977. Even when measured against the higher poverty line threshold of $4.20/day for low middle-income countries, poverty had dropped from 57.7 per cent in 2011 to 23.9 per cent by 2022, representing a steep 60 per cent decline in just a decade (see infographics). This unprecedented acceleration in poverty reduction is one of the biggest achievements of the Modi government on the economic front. With poverty levels now at historic lows, there may be a need to revisit some of the major policies to plug loopholes and promote efficiency and sustainability. We look at food and fertiliser subsidies, as they claim the largest resources in the agri-food space and yet give sub-optimal results. The food subsidy budget for FY26 is slated to be Rs 2.03 lakh crore. India is giving free food (rice or wheat, 5kg/person/month) to more than 800 million people. With extreme poverty falling to just 5.3 per cent, there is a need to rationalise this food subsidy by giving beneficiaries food coupons (digital wallet) to buy nutritious food — pulses, milk, eggs — from designated stores. The value of food coupons for the bottom, say 15 per cent of the population, could be Rs 700/family/month, and this amount can come down to Rs 500/family/month based on the income of the identified beneficiaries. This will help plug leakages, diversify diets, promote nutrition, and diversify the production basket. Similar rationalisation is needed for fertiliser subsidy, which is slated to claim another Rs 1.56 lakh crore in FY26. This can be done by giving fertiliser coupons to farmers and deregulating the prices of fertiliser products. Farmers can use these coupons to buy chemical fertilisers or bio-fertilisers or do natural farming. The imbalanced use of N, P, and K can be corrected, leakages plugged and innovations in products and practices promoted, only if the government deregulates this sector. This task is overdue, and if the Modi government can do it now, it will help streamline the agri-food sector to a large extent. The Modi government can reap rich dividends in terms of saving financial resources, higher efficiency in the use of fertilisers, less dependence on imports, and less environmental degradation, especially of soil, water and air. The government would need to identify tenant farmers. The task also requires triangulation of several sets of data, and communicating with farmers in advance and earning their trust. This is a political exercise, which must precede policy change. No one else is a better communicator in the political sphere today than the Prime Minister himself. Gulati is Distinguished Professor and Juneja is a Research Fellow at ICRIER. Views are personal
