-TheIndiaForum.in The lockdown has devastated livelihoods at unprecedented levels, causing widespread job losses and hunger. The measures so far will not solve the crisis. India should universalise the PDS, expand cash transfers, and create a national job guarantee scheme. The Covid-19 global pandemic and its associated containment measures have taken a heavy toll on economies and societies worldwide. In India, the national lockdown, imposed on 24 March and subsequently extended three times...

-TheWire.in By not including tenant farmers in ambit of its schemes, the state government is leaving marginalised farmers in the lurch Suryapet (Telangana): Remembering how her husband died five years ago, and the hardships she has faced since, 45-year-old B. Saidamma is reduced to tears. Her husband, B. Bhadrayya from Bhaktalapuram village in Penpahad mandal of Telangana’s Suryapet district, died by suicide after he was unable to pay back a Rs 5...

-Frontline.in The Budget lacks any serious effort to address the main issues of unemployment, agrarian distress and falling incomes, revealing a high level of official insensitivity. A Budget during a time of recession, increasing unemployment, agrarian distress, falling incomes, demand constraint and malnutrition would have done well to first acknowledge the mess that policies have created and then taken steps to provide employment, boost rural incomes, increase purchasing power and thereby demand. Coming...

-PTI Statistics for female farmer suicides are "complete rubbish" as the discussion on women victims of agrarian crisis often becomes a discussion of their role as widows of male farmers, he said. New Delhi: Tens of thousands of women get excluded from the farmer suicides data in the country just because they are never considered as farmers, senior journalist-cum-agriculture expert P Sainath said on Friday. Delivering his valedictorian address at the XVI National...

-Newsclick.in According to NCRB, as many as 3,53,803 farm suicides have taken place between 1995 and 2018 across the country. 85.81% of the deceased were male farmers, indicating that around 50,188 female farmers had ended their lives in this period. “I had to struggle eight long years to get one acre of land transferred to my name after the death of my husband,” said Vidya More, a 38-year-old woman farmer who had...