India, Feb. 24 -- The ministry of agriculture has developed a Farmers' Distress Index (FDI), this newspaper reported on Sunday. The index, the report says, will factor in multiple indicators to give local-level estimates of farm distress. To be sure, the government is yet to come up with more details and we do not know whether the new FDI will generate an individual (for every farmer) indicator of distress or lead to some sort of data that can be tracked to ascertain a generic state of the farm sector in the country.

But, an earlier study on the issue by A Amarender Reddy - he is one of the key architects of the index - in 2021 in the journal Land (tinyurl.com/2bafebmw) suggests that the idea of what could be described as a pilot version...