Potato farmers Madhusudan Mondal and Lakshman Adak, in their mid-50s, live 15km apart in West Bengal’s Hooghly district. Both have produced a bumper crop this year, but that has meant different things for Mondal and Adak. Mondal earned around Rs3.5 lakh selling 150 tonnes of potatoes to PepsiCo India Holdings Pvt. Ltd, having signed a contract with the maker of carbonated beverages and Frito-Lay chips to sell his produce to it...
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'For tribals, development means exploitation' by Jyoti Punwani
BD Sharma is one of India's foremost experts on tribal issues. He has served as collector of undivided Bastar district in chhattisgarh and commissioner for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes and has campaigned extensively to protect the rights of tribals. Currently, the coordinator of Bharat Jan Andolan, a network of grass-roots organisations, Sharma tells that current notions of development are at the root of the Maoist insurgency: What has changed...
More »Ideology can't be wiped out by attacking tribals: Arundhati Roy by Manisha Jha
Dubbing the Centre's talk of ceasefire and talks with naxals “non-serious,” members of democratic and civil rights organisations on Friday demanded that the state stop the military offensive, Operation Greenhunt, “against its own people” and initiate back-channel talks with the CPI (Maoist). Addressing a press conference here, writer and human rights activist Arundhati Roy said: “The government's use of the military to solve political problems is not new. The government has...
More »Farmer suicide rate: 5 a week by Sanjeev Kumar Patro
The bane of farmers’ suicides has taken Orissa in its vice-like grip with five ending their lives in every seven days. The trend has grown by over six per cent in 2008 as the State has climbed the ladder at a notoriously fast pace to rank 12th of the 28 states with most farmer deaths, the statistics released by the National Crime Records Bureau has revealed. The growth is over 40...
More »Now, a farmers’ suicide SENSEX by Sadiq Naqvi
Nearly 2 lakh farmers committed suicide in India since 1997. The share of big five states accounted for 1,22,823 suicides in this 12 year period. The data compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau points out that 16,196 farmers in India ended their life in 2008. K Nagaraj, an economist, in his report Farmers' suicides in India: Magnitude, Trends and Spatial Patterns, says, "The title to land was taken as the...
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