-GovernanceNow.com As farmers protests take centre stage across the country, Swaraj Party convenor explains the ecological, economic and existential crisis behind this unrest. * We have recently seen farmers from Tamil Nadu protesting in the national capital. Then Maharashtra farmers protested, deciding not to send their produce to cities. The agitation has now reached Madhya Pradesh, leading to killings. Why there is sudden farmers’ unrest in the country? I think we...

-Scroll.in After the unprecedented collapse of the price of potatoes, farmers in the state are faced with low prices for their crop of sunflower seeds and maize. At around 10 am on Friday, 58-year-old Devi Dayal Sharma sat on a chair, surrounded by several quintals of sunflower seeds, at the Shahabad mandi, around 20 km from Kurukshetra town in Haryana. Sharma is a sunflower cultivator from a Padlu village in Kurukshetra...

-The Hindu Managers of around 3,000 privately-run markets are to meet and protest new rules that ban sale of animals for slaughter at cattle markets Fridays are festive days at Pachokhara. For nearly half-a-century now, farmers, cattle-rearers and tradesmen have made the weekly trip to the cricket stadium-sized grounds of the Upadhyay family— prominent local land-owners — to trade cattle. A dirt road splits the ground into a section for buffaloes and another for...

-The Hindu Liberalisation has eroded the institutional capacity to train young people who might pursue liberal values The other day, a student asked me what exactly the word ‘liberal’ mean. She wanted to know whether ‘liberalisation’ promotes ‘liberal’ values. She had noticed that institutions of higher education, which are supposed to promote liberal values, were finding it difficult to resist ideological and commercial pressures triggered by the process of economic liberalisation. So,...

-Hindustan Times The animating impulse of Indian politics, pundits of all stripes insist, is youthful aspiration: fearless young people throwing off the shackles of caste and class to Whatsapp their way to what the Prime Minister likes to call “vikas”. Parties like the Bharatiya Janta Party understand this, the argument goes, and are handsomely rewarded; the opposition doesn’t, and is doomed to failure. But a recent CSDS-KAS survey paints a rather different picture:...