-The Indian Express Agriculture doesn’t pay that much, land is no longer the source of power it once was, and the community has failed to keep up with a changing India. The Jats conform fully to the idea of a ‘dominant caste’, a term the eminent sociologist M N Srinivas used to refer to any community that is both numerically strong in a village or local area, as well as wields...

-Hindustan Times Bhopal/Sagar: When 39-year-old Ram Dwivedi shot himself with a rifle in Uttar Pradesh’s water-starved Banda district a few months ago, it came as a shock even to local residents in the drought-ravaged Bundelkhand region. In the past few years, most people who committed suicide in the area were either tenants or small-time farmers. But despite having 20 acres of land, Dwivedi couldn’t generate enough income to sustain his six-member family. Hit...

-Livemint.com The most glaring implication of the proposed deficiency payments is that it makes the state give up its responsibility of intervening in markets During the past few months, there has been a highly contested debate on the merits, viability and feasibility of crop insurance in India given the large number of small farmers and the large amount of subsidy involved that is not being effectively used as the coverage of...

-The Indian Express TISS report maps pitfalls in Rajiv Gandhi Jeevandayee Arogya Yojana Mumbai: OVER three-fifths or 63 per cent beneficiaries of the state government’s Rajiv Gandhi Jeevandayee Arogya Yojana (RGJAY) made out-of-pocket (OOP) payments for services after admission to hospitals, and a significantly higher proportion of patients from Below Poverty Line (BPL) families (88.23 per cent) reported paying for diagnostics, medications, or consumables, according to a report by the Tata...

-The Indian Express The voucher scheme is supposed to act as an intervention for LIG and EWS segments who are forced to seek accommodation elsewhere in the face of inadequate social rental housing THE MINISTRY of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation is considering introduction of subsidies, in the form of direct benefit transfer, that would be provided to economically weaker sections (EWS) and low income group (LIG) households towards their rent payments. The...