-India Today Ahmedabad: IIT-Madras graduate Kannan Lakshminarayan dusted a few copies of "Young India" to find Mahatma Gandhi's vision and initiate cotton farmers to use miniature spinning machines right in their village where they grow the crop and increase their income. Following this, the middleman was out, the long-drawn value chain was short-circuited while farmers became spinners first and subsequently, weavers and even garment makers. In 1920, Mahatma Gandhi had written in...

-The Hindu Handlooms are the one area where India leads the world in skill, creativity and expertise. The Handloom Reservation Act must be strengthened, not repealed Last month, Gajendra Singh, a farmer, hanged himself in New Delhi. His death attracted massive attention as it happened so publicly, in front of the hundreds of people gathered there for Aam Aadmi Party’s rally against the Land Acquisition Bill. Such attention is rare, given that...

-The New Indian Express If the Government of India writes off the Handloom Reservation Act, more than one lakh weavers in Telangana and AP will be affected, fears All India Federation of Handloom Organisations   The handloom sector which is one of the biggest is always caught in the vicious cycle of low demand, massive unemployment, dwindling incomes and starvation deaths. This time, the problem has been compounded by the Government of India...

-Economic and Political Weekly Unlimited growth for prosperity in a fi nite planet is not possible. Ecological economists like Tim Jackson, Peter Victor, and others talk about prosperity without growth and highlight the need for greening the economy on a community scale. Using the "criteria of green economy enterprise" set by Jackson and Victor as a tool, this article looks at khadi production, India's community-level cloth production system. Sumanas Koulagi (k.sumanas@yahoo.in) is...

-The Indian Express The government's attempt to amend the UPA's land acquisition law is facing stiff resistance in Parliament and outside. The Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (LARR) Act, 2013, combined three different approaches to resolve conflict over land. One is to let money speak. It increased compensation amounts significantly. The second is to let farmers speak. Projects involving private companies had to earn the consent of 80 per cent of...