Agricultural marketing in India suffers from inefficiency, a disconnect between the prices received by producers and the prices paid by consumers, fragmented marketing channels, poor infrastructure and policy distortions. Urgent reforms are needed to address these inadequacies and check the excesses of middlemen. While encouraging new models that improve the bargaining power of producers and scaling up successful experiments, producers' companies and cooperative marketing societies could be promoted to provide alternative avenues for sale of produce.

This paper is a review of the literature on agricultural commodity markets in India, in relation to the three vital roles these markets are thought to play. It outlines the strengths and limitations of each approach and shows how they contribute to our understanding of the workings of real markets. The paper also suggests a holistic view of markets, built on the basis of the insights of existing literature to enrich our knowledge of the complexity and diversity of real markets and assist realistic policymaking.

In recent years, agricultural markets in India have grown in size and complexity, not only in terms of volumes and commodities traded but also in terms of regulatory reforms and a proliferation of new marketing channels and arrangements, with new and evolving roles played by both state and private players. A new generation of theoretically-grounded empirical research is urgently needed to make sense of these rapidly changing agricultural markets and their linkages.

AnRak Aluminium is moving ahead with the bauxite mining project in Makavarapalem in Visakhapatnam district despite the local opposition warns this analysis in the Economic and Political Weekly with focus on social and environment impact of the project.

Many villages gradually get included in cities and urban people also migrate to villages transforming them into towns. Both phenomena require intensive study, including an examination of the defi ning criteria of a "town", and the estimates of urban population.

The use of liquefi ed petroleum gas as a clean cooking fuel increased dramatically between 2007-08 and 2009-10. Its use in rural areas is still confi ned to a minority, but this is changing rapidly. The situation now is very different from that portrayed in "Subsidies for Whom? The Case of LPG in India" (EPW, 3 November 2012), which used dated information from 2004-05 for its analysis.

The history of communal forest management in south India shows its exclusive nature. The resistance to colonial forest policies forced the administration in the Madras Presidency to look for options to pacify public discontent. At the level of policy, it was the dominant agrarian communities that evolved an effective link with political parties and the native press, compelling the revenue department and the colonial state to recognise their claims.

There is a core concept of good governance, the combination of authority and responsibility to pursue the common good, that has remained stable over millennia. Building on this concept the paper develops several indices of the quality of governance and applies these indices to rank major states in India. The governance indices have been derived from the three main pillars of the government, i e, the legislature, the judiciary and the executive. Performance on each dimension of governance has been measured using indicators that are all based exclusively on factual data, not perceptions.

he Supreme Court, in its fi nal order of October 1991, upheld the compensation settlement with Union Carbide which made the Government of India liable for any shortfall in compensation or any new claims from the Bhopal gas victims. Following this order the Indian Council of Medical Research disbanded its medical esearch on the long-term medical effects of the disaster. A recent Supreme Court order directs the ICMR to resume that research, but the question that looms is why the ICMR abdicated its ethical mandate and allowed its subordination to a political diktat.

Other than in China, where the reduction in poverty has been spectacular, progress in poverty reduction in the world during the past three decades has been modest. This slow progress and the decline in infl uence of the Washington Consensus has prompted new thinking on poverty and its reduction.