-Business Standard The lens with which we report India's farm crisis has to change As we head for another year of trouble in the countryside, it is time to discard the enduring media tropes of rural distress. Like the image of a grizzled Indian farmer, framed against his parched field looking up at an unrelenting sky. Or the all too pervasive conflation of rural distress with farmer suicides. Such characterisation offers the...
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PIB Launches Blog, Ministries List Achievements
-Outlook The Press Information Bureau (PIB) today launched a blog to mark the country's 69th Independence Day. The blog, https://pibindia.wordpress.com has posts and articles by Union Ministers of Rural Development Birender Singh and of Environment and Forest Prakash Javadekar and also other ministries highlighting achievements of the government. A colourful factsheet on the government's activities is also embedded in the blog. "The move is a part of its overall shift towards more interactive...
More »India’s suicide problem -Shamika Ravi
-The Indian Express Response to the crisis of farmer suicides is narrowly focused. Poor health accounts for most suicides, necessitating improved access to healthcare rather than special packages For over a decade, farmer suicides in India has been a serious public policy concern. More recently, this has led to a shrill media outcry and much politicking. The government response to the crisis of farmer suicide has mostly been simplistic and sometimes aggravating....
More »Spare Some Change -Lola Nayar, Arindam Mukherjee, Arushi Bedi, Pragya Singh & Pavithra S Rangan
-Outlook Social spends have been cut, rural India is in crisis, have we got the growth story wrong? When journalist P. Sainath met him, Jain saab, 45, was the ‘head of departments’ cum sports officer and principal of the Government P.G College, Alirajpur, Madhya Pradesh. The meeting was recorded in Sainath’s magnum opus, Everybody Loves a Good Drought, in 1995. As Sainath wrote then: “The schooling system, despite many stupid experiments,...
More »The Importance of Being 'Rurban': Tracking Changes in a Traditional Setting -Dipankar Gupta
-Economic and Political Weekly A categorical distinction is facing rough weather--that between urban and rural. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in not just as external markets but as external inputs. Further, many of our villages barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker in towns is slowly...
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