-TheStatesman.com Vijay Jardhari, who started the ‘Beej Bachao Andolan’ Uttarakhand in 1986 along with fellow farmers, has dedicated his life to conserving traditional seeds, which otherwise would have disappeared due to wide acceptability of hybrid seeds among farmers Dehradun: Flashback 1986: Whenever farmer and social activist Vijay Jardhari and his friends would visit any village telling locals to conserve their traditional seeds and to continue consuming millets, people would make fun of...

-TheWire.in It is set law that procedures cannot impact vested substantive rights – and the right to life and correspondingly, food, is the most substantive of all rights. “After a prolonged decline, world hunger appears to be on the rise again”, claims  a report titled ‘The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (2017)’ by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. Nowhere is this more true than in...

-TheWire.in Mexican economist David Barkin on India's neoliberal economics, growing inequalities, agrarian distress and more. David Barkin is Professor of Economics at the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City. He received his doctorate in economics from Yale University and was awarded the National Prize in Political Economics in 1979 for his analysis of inflation in Mexico. His research has focused on the development of an alternative to the capitalist economic model. In an...

-The Hindu The Araku valley saw its first childbirth in a hospital, thanks to young nurses drawn from the tribes themselves On an ordinary workday, 27-year-old Pramila Bariki hikes up steep slopes, across fields, through ankle-deep rivulets, often walking up to 14 km. She gets a ride until the road is motorable, from which point she has to walk. Her job? She doles out healthcare advice to mothers and children in the remotest...

-Hindustan Times Election Commission of India (ECI) is outgunned when it comes to confronting those who circumvent existing campaign finance rules and lacks power to sanction candidates. It is a truism to note that political finance sits at the heart of corruption in modern India. While politicians publicly lament the status quo, they privately profit from the current system. Therefore, the fact that the Narendra Modi government has made reforming political finance...