Madhya Pradesh Farmer Welfare and Agriculture Development Minister Ramkrishna Kusmaria has courted a controversy by blaming farmers’ suicides on their “past sins”. “These are old sins that are resulting in such incidents,”the minister told a TV channel on Wednesday, and elaborated it by pointing to indiscriminate use of “chemicals” that has reduced the fertility and “resistance power” of agricultural land. A few cases of farmers’ suicides have been recently reported from Damoh,...

The first-ever meeting of the Standing Committee of National Tribal Welfare Committee comprising representatives of all states was held on Wednesday with an aim to prepare a draft national policy to improve the the life of tribals and ensure that they get their rights. Minister of Tribal Affairs Kantilal Bhuria said till now each state was making its own policy due to which the overall development of the community was...

The trial court judgment holding Binayak Sen guilty of sedition has led to widespread outrage. IN India's legal history, no trial court judgment in a criminal case has perhaps caused as much international outrage as the December 24, 2010, judgment of the Second Additional District and Sessions Judge of Raipur, B.P. Verma, did. In his 92-page judgment, Judge Verma convicted Dr Binayak Sen, the well-known human rights activist and medical...

It's an irony of sorts. Mannina Maga (son of the soil) and former Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda's home district Hassan has emerged as the capital of farmers' suicides in Karnataka. Government statistics show that nearly 2,597 killed themselves between 2003 and 2010, making it the worst period for farmer suicides in the state. Among 30 districts from where suicides were reported, nearly 268 suicides were reported in Hassan...

Also failed to notice how his predecessor misled the Prime Minister Communications and IT Minister Kapil Sibal might have termed the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India (CAG)'s calculation of loss to the exchequer from underpricing of 2G spectrum “utterly erroneous,” but he has completely ignored other scenarios presented by the auditor where new operators made crores by selling their stakes to global telecom giants or were themselves ready to pay more...