Communist Party of India (Marxist) Polit Bureau member Brinda Karat has charged the Centre with formulating economic policies which had allegedly widened the divide between poor and rich. “In the last ten years, the poor became poorer and rich became richer due to the liberal economic policy of the UPA government. The women are the worst affected as they suffer from malnutrition and anaemia,” she said. While addressing Ganatantrik Nari Samiti, the...

Thousands of farmers from Saurashtra gathered here on Friday to protest against the Centre’s cotton export policy. The government has fixed a cap of 55 lakh bales for export in 2010-11, even as a record yield of cotton is expected this year. During the convention organised Maha Gujarat Agri Cotton Produce Company (MGACPC) at Shahshri Maidan, the farmers demanded that the export limit should be increased to one crore bales. They...

  The sea change that India’s national scheme for rural employment guarantee has accomplished is hard to fathom, its vastness touching the lives or more than 100 million people. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005 (NREGA, subsequently renamed after Mahatma Gandhi, or MGNREGA) was a landmark in Indian legislation. Under the act, as of April 2008, for the first time in India’s history, all rural citizens have a legal right...

The decision to defer cotton export registration by one month – from October 1 to November 1 – may help the textile companies in the short term because of sufficient availability, but there are concerns on how long that would last. Arrivals of cotton are uncertain across India with farmers apprehensive about the yield due to inclement weather. The early varieties of cotton from Punjab and Haryana have also been affected...

The sugarcane growers in Orissa’s Ganjam district have urged the authorities of Aska Cooperative Sugar Industry (ACSI) to fix the cane price at ' 2500 per quintal at the field level during the coming crushing season. The factory authorities had paid '1700 per quintal to the cane growers last year. The sugarcane farmers want increase in cane prices to be announced before the start of the crushing season which begins from...