According to the National Crime Records Bureau, since 2003, one Indian farmer has committed suicide every 30 minutes. In 2008, 16,196 farmers took their own lives, bringing the total number of farmer suicides in India between 1997 and 2008 to 199,132. (Significantly, P. Sainath is of the opinion that like all government data, these figures too are unreliable. For when women farmhands kill themselves, their deaths are not enlisted as...

Though terming the cause “genuine”, the Supreme Court Friday refused to intervene in a public interest litigation (PIL) highlighting suicide of farmers as a sign of lapse in the nation’s agricultural policy.   “We cannot change the agricultural policy... Show us the law under which we can order a review of the policy and we will direct it. At the end of the day our orders must be enforceable and not just...

VISHAL, the son of a farm labourer in the west Indian state of Maharashtra, is almost four. He should weigh around 16kg (35lb). But scooping him up from the floor costs his nursery teacher, a frail woman in a faded sari, little effort. She slips Vishal’s scrawny legs through two holes cut in the corners of a cloth sack, which she hooks to a weighing scale. The needle stops at...

Among the various definitions of "noise" is this one: "Something that draws public notice". And "Making Noise" is precisely what groups all over India are doing, or planning to do, in the days ahead in order to wake up the government to its promises. In the year 2000, India was among the countries that had signed on to achieve, by 2015, the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These goals...

Banks will have to put in place a mechanism to verify that microfinance institutes (MFI) they finance do not charge exorbitant rates to the final borrowers. The finance ministry has asked banks to ensure that MFIs, whom banks are financing, do not lend at rates more than 24% — all inclusive rates — to the ultimate borrowers. Some banks have recently inserted a clause while lending to MFIs that they...