-The Hindu It’s time to debate the modalities of the next Census, given the earlier confusion over caste data. As the 2011 Census approached, demands for inclusion of data on caste in Census reached a crescendo. P. Chidambaram, the Union Home Minister at the time, was opposed to collecting caste data and blocked it by claiming that it was logistically impossible for the Census, but caste information could be collected via the...

-The Indian Express Only 21 per cent of India’s milk production gets processed through the organised sector and the rest passes through unorganised small players. And that’s where the crisis is most intense. Farmers, who had high expectations from the Narendra Modi government, are a disillusioned lot today. Market prices of several crops have remained well below their minimum support prices (MSPs). Moreover, milk prices have fallen by 20 per cent...

-Hindustan Times Profitability takes a hit as real MSPs have not risen over the years New Delhi: Most commentary around rural anger in India has been focused on either the sector’s growth performance or government spending on agriculture. Such analysis is likely to present an incomplete picture at best. Government spending on agriculture is a small fraction of the total agricultural economic output. In 2017-18, the ministry of agriculture’s spending was less...

-The Hindu Conflicts, climate change are main hurdles in meeting development goals The number of hungry people in the world has risen for the first time in more than a decade, according to a United Nations report released on Wednesday. There are now approximately 38 million more undernourished people in the world, rising from 777 million in 2015 to 815 million in 2016, the year for which the latest statistics are available. According to...

-RuralIndiaOnline.org Imagine a democratic protest where a million farmers, labourers and others march to the capital and compel discussion of the exploding crisis of the countryside in a special three-week session of Parliament India’s agrarian crisis has gone beyond the agrarian. It’s a crisis of society. Maybe even a civilizational crisis, with perhaps the largest body of small farmers and labourers on earth fighting to save their livelihoods. The agrarian crisis is no...