-GovernanceNow.com The cost of maintaining our 5.3 million stray cattle comes to about Rs 30,115 core per year A lot of debate that we witness in the media on the cattle question these days suffer from the disease of speculative utopian imagination of a ‘cow-nation’ and relentless abuses for those beef-eating ‘others’. Political debates over the question of our bovine stock has mostly been heavily polarising and mindlessly simplistic, notwithstanding exceptions like veteran...
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Lives in Debt: Narratives of Agrarian Distress and Farmer Suicides -Ajay Dandekar & Sreedeep Bhattacharya
-Economic and Political Weekly Ajay Dandekar (ajay.dandekar@snu.edu.in) is a professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar University. Sreedeep Bhattacharya (sb514@snu.edu.in) is a fellow at the Centre of Public Affairs and Critical Theory, Shiv Nadar University. A study in two districts recording high numbers of farmer suicide—Yavatmal in Maharashtra and Sangrur in Punjab—explores the tipping point for this desperate act and finds that in addition to the shame of...
More »Deepak Pental, innovator of the transgenic mustard variety, interviewed by Sayantan Bera (Livemint.com)
-Livemint.com All our solutions in agriculture, besides management issues, are going to come from science and technology, says Deepak Pental, innovator of GM mustard Last week, the environment ministry’s regulator, the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC), cleared the commercial release of genetically modified (GM) mustard, leaving it to the government to take a final call. If approved, it will be India’s first food crop developed using transgenic technology, 15 years after Bt...
More »Young India Is Conservative: Opposed To Homosexuality, Likes To Marry Within Their Caste, Wants A Government Job -Rukmini S
-Huffington Post A majority believed that religion (47%) should take precedence over science (33%). Socially conservative, religiously inclined, worried about jobs - a new nationally representative sample survey of India's youth paints a sobering profile of what young people think and want. Ten years after their first such survey, the Delhi-based Centre for the Study in Developing Societies (CSDS) and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS), a German foundation associated with a political party,...
More »Funds fear on Dalit research -Pheroze L Vincent and Basant Mohanty
-The Telegraph New Delhi: The government has decided to stop funding research centres on social discrimination at several universities, prompting accusations of shielding the "Brahminical social order". "It's ironic that these centres, which research Dalits, B.R. Ambedkar's philosophy, social exclusion and inclusive policies like reservation, are being closed down when the University Grants Commission (the higher education regulator) is funding courses on Vedic studies," said N. Sukumar, Ambedkar scholar and teacher of...
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