-The Hindu Business Line The solution lies in better prices for produce, generating non-farm income, and reducing costs of farming After the Yogi Adityanath government waived farm loans of about ?36,000 crore for UP farmers, pressure has mounted on other States to follow suit. But contrary to common belief, debt waivers aside from possibly guaranteeing electoral victory, do little to alleviate the plight of farmers. Neither do they help kick-start the rural...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: In the last five years, over 28 lakh units of blood and its components were discarded by Banks across India, exposing serious loopholes in the nation's blood banking system. If calculated in litres, the cumulative wastage of 6% translates to over 6 lakh litres —a volume enough to fill up 53 water tankers. India faces, on average, a shortfall of 3 million units of blood annually. Lack of...

-The Hindu Business Line These bearer instruments can’t make political funding transparent; they don’t address the insidious corporate-politico nexus The Government is all set to introduce a scheme offering political bonds as bearer instruments which will conceal the identity of the bond buyers and enable a process of political donations that, it argues, will make funding political parties transparent. The argument is deeply flawed. Electoral bonds as envisaged here open up yet another...

-TheHoot.org Maharashtra’s farm daily Agrowon offered a counter to the SBI chief, the RBI governor, and English newspapers critical of the UP farm loan waiver. The Marathi agriculture daily Agrowon has criticized both the RBI governor Urjit Patel and State Bank of India’s Arundhati Bhattacharya  who have objected to the farm  loan waiver in Uttar Pradesh and similar demands elsewhere. The paper’s line is quite different from that of the mainstream English...

-TheWire.in Community managed rice Banks have replaced defunct government managed rice Banks in several areas of Patna district in Bihar. A few years ago, Parbhawati Devi, Bichiya Devi and Meena Devi were landless farm laborers, fully at the mercy of landed farmers for their survival. But things have changed since then. Today, hundreds of women in dozens of villages in Patna district of Bihar, mostly from the marginalised Mahadalit community, have turned...