-Down to Earth How this backward district in Haryana has borne the brunt of stringent cow-related laws “How do you fit a veterinary doctor, fodder and a water tank inside a pickup van?” asks Nooruddin, sitting at a tea shop. The 50-year-old former goat keeper now marks buffaloes with colour at the animal market in Firozpur Jhirka for Rs 200, twice a week. Supplementary earnings working at a butcher shop take his...

-TheWire.in On January 1, an 80-year-old woman died of starvation. The family slipped through the many government schemes meant to provide relief. Outside her deceased mother’s rented house in Mahuadanr block of Jharkhand’s Latehar district sat Bhagiya Birjain. Bhagiya, a widow, lived in a nearby settlement after her marriage. She was the first to arrive after hearing that her mother, Budhni Birjiyan, 80, died while she was alone, on the night of...

-TheNewsMinute.com Shilpa Prabhakar Satish, who became the district’s first woman collector when she took charge in May 2018, says her daughter enjoys going to the anganwadi daily. At a time when parents across the state are in deep discussions over which play school to admit their wards in the coming summer, Tirunelveli’s first woman collector, Shilpa Prabhakar Satish, has chosen a government run anganwadi for her daughter. And the 2009 batch...

-The Telegraph The Mamata Banerjee government claims that its khadya sathi food scheme has eliminated hunger Calcutta: A study carried out by the Pratichi Institute and the Asiatic Society has found out that a significant proportion of tribal people in Bengal had faced “food scarcity of varying degrees” in the past one year. The finding drills holes into Mamata Banerjee government’s claims that its policy of cheap food grain supply, known as khadya...

-Livemint.com Delayed assessment of loss and settlement of claims by insurance companies may have led to farmers losing faith in Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana, say analysts New Delhi: Sharad Markad, a lanky teenager from a marginal farming family in Maharashtra, spent the first day of 2019 scrounging for funds. Faced with a drought, the third in the past five years, Markad had taken it upon himself to build a community cattle...