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The purpose of this paper is to examine the market response of apple growers to price and price risk along with weather factors and weather risk in the state of Jammu & Kashmir. In other words, it tries to find the both short-run and long-run price elasticities of apples' market arrival and also the elasticity with respect to price-risk and weather-risk variables.

This paper uses the bound test approach of “auto-regressive distributed lag” (ARDL) model. Monthly data on market arrival of apples and respective prices along with other nonprice factors are used.

The bound test approach of ARDL confirms the existence of long-run relationship between the market arrival of apples and price and nonprice factors. The market response to price is found to be inelastic both in shortrun and longrun. The risk coefficients are negative indicating that apple growers are risk averse. However, they do respond strongly to weather risk than price risk.

Weather insurance must be provided to the apple growers to safeguard their production loss due to weather risks. Proper infrastructure in the form of storage facilities, marketing information, transport and communication to local markets should be provided to them. Unavailability of data at the district level poses a great difficulty to have a panel data analysis. But future research can be initiated to bridge this gap.

This paper considers the market response of apple growers under both price risk and weather risk which is first in its nature. The authors have not found any other paper discussing this in the case of apple in India.

This study examines whether the law of one price (LOP) or price convergence holds during the COVID-19 pandemic for essential food items in India.

The authors use the daily retail price data of 22 essential food items from 103 Indian markets for two years (2019 as pre-COVID and 2020 as COVID period). Pesaran's (2007) second-generation panel unit-root test has been used to examine the price convergence of essential food commodities across various markets of different zones in the pre-COVID and COVID periods.

The authors find a tendency toward the convergence of prices across the spatially segregated markets for essential products. But, during the COVID period, there is a weak or no convergence of prices for essential food items. Hence, the LOP does not hold during the pandemic, indicating massive price deviations for food items across Indian markets. This has severe implications for food security as enormous price increases in some markets have been evidenced during the pandemic.

The study calls for immediate policy adoption to restore the disrupted supply chain of essential food items. Along with that, the public authority should strictly prohibit black marketing and unlawful hoarding of essential food items. In addition, farmers should be provided direct cash benefits for restoring their farming activities.

This paper is first study to examine that hypothesis of LOP in the context of COVID crisis.

This paper investigates the deterrence effect of development on crime against women in India. Specifically, the authors examine the deterrence effect of the composite development index, i.e. Human Development Index (HDI), along with other variables acting as development indicators such as women’s employment, the relative strength of women in the police force, urbanization, etc., on crimes against women.

This study adopts a fixed effect within-group (WG) panel regression model and pooled regression model on the data of 28 states over 20 years from 2000 to 2019. For checking the robustness of the results, the authors use the estimation from the system generalized method of moments.

The results confirm the deterrence effect of development as measured by the HDI and female labor force participation on various crimes against women. In addition, female feticide representing the socio-cultural attitude toward women turned out to be another significant determinant of almost all types of crime against women. Further, the study also finds the deterrence effect of variables such as police expenditure, the relative strength of women in the police force, urbanization and arrest rate on various crimes against women.

This research paper is unique because it tries to examine the deterrence hypothesis of development by taking a composite index of development, i.e. HDI and other variables at the state level in the Indian union.

This paper finds the returns from soil conservation practices and examines whether the welfare implications of adopting the conservation practices are heterogeneous across the farming groups in Indian agriculture.

The study uses an endogenous switching regression (ESR) method on the data collected from the 77th round of National Sample Survey (2019–21) to quantify the returns from adopting soil conservation practices.

It finds that farmers adopting soil health conservation practices would have reduced their crop yield by 13% if they did not implement them. Similarly, smallholders who have not adopted soil health management practices would have increased crop yield by 16% if they had adopted the practices. The authors also observed that the returns from adopting soil health management practices vary across farming groups, where marginal and large farms tend to gain higher yields. Finally, the authors find that regardless of farm size, smallholders who did not adopt soil health management practices would benefit from adopting these with increased crop yields of 29%–31%.

More data could have been better for drawing policy implications, since the number of soil card users are relatively less.

This research work uses nationally representative data, which is first in nature on this very aspect.

This paper examines the determinants of concurrent adoption of farm risk management strategies by rice growers in two different ecosystems of Telangana agriculture-irrigated and rainfed ecosystems.

The primary data have been collected from the rice growers in two different ecosystems, and after checking the variance inflation factor (VIF) for controlling multicollinearity, a multinomial logit model has been used to examine the determinants of concurrent adoption of coping strategies by rice growers.

The study finds that adopting one risk management strategy persuades farmers to embrace other strategies, reducing the risk in agriculture between the two ecosystems. Among the determinants, farmers' age, education, contact with extension services, irrigation sources, livestock income, total farm income, crop loss reasons, and crop insurance awareness significantly influence the adoption of various risk management measures. However, considerable heterogeneity is found among the driving forces across the rice ecosystems.

The major policy implications that can be drawn from the analysis are increased access to information through government-funded extension services and the provision of alternative risk management technologies, such as drought-resistant or flood-resistant seeds, farmers' field schools and increased provision of crop insurance, farmer-friendly agriculture extension services, and farm investment support, are critical for assisting farmers managing risks. In addition, however, there should be ecosystem-specific policies to tackle the ecosystem heterogeneity.

This paper is very timely and entails some relevant policy implications for the development of Indian agriculture.