-TheWire.in As one village prepares to take the government to court, another claims panchayat land reserved for scheduled castes was auctioned by proxy to ‘upper caste’ families. Chandigarh: One-and-a-half months ago, Amrik Kaur, sarpanch of village Sekhowal in Ludhiana district, was asked to attend a meeting at the Ludhiana deputy commissioner’s office. There, she was asked to give her consent for the transfer of a portion of the village common (shamlat) land...

-The Hindu True self-reliance won’t come from relentless industrialisation, but from localisation and decentralisation, as demonstrated by these remarkable stories of empowered rural communities Not so long ago, Dalit women farmers in Telangana used to face hunger and deprivation. Today, they have contributed foodgrains for pandemic relief. Farmers on the Tamil Nadu-Karnataka border have been sending organic produce to Bengaluru even during the lockdown. And Adivasi villages in central India are using...

-Vikalp.ind.in During the late 1950s when villages near the Kyasanur Forest in Karnataka started to become crowded, farmers began to clear the forest to find new land for agriculture as well as for construction of houses and roads. This brought them to close contact with the primates in the forest. When Kyasanur Forest Disease (KFD) outbreak took place among monkeys, the virus did not take much time to jump species and...

-The Hindu India slid into the pandemic crisis in the backdrop of economic downslide; fiscal stimulus has to be structured The impact of COVID-19 will be debilitating for the global as well as the Indian economies. Various institutions have assessed India’s growth prospects for 2020-21 ranging from 0.8% (Fitch) to 4.0% (Asian Development Bank). This wide range indicates the extent of uncertainty and tentative nature of these forecasts. The International Monetary Fund...

-The Hindu The economic crisis can be overcome only by raising the consumption of and investment for the poor Impoverishment among English workers during the early years of the Industrial Revolution had prompted Leicester framework knitters to frame this resolution in 1817: “… if liberal Wages were given to the Mechanics in general throughout the Country, the Home Consumption of our Manufactures would be immediately more than doubled, and consequently every hand...