Showing its concern for farmers, the Mayawati government on Wednesday decided to implement the amended national agriculture insurance scheme (NAIS) and the all weather-based crop insurance scheme from the current sowing season. Both these schemes involve an expenditure of Rs 900 lakh. A decision to this effect was taken at a cabinet meeting presided over by chief minister Mayawati here on Wednesday. The NAIS, according to an official release, will be implemented...

With three small children to raise in a dirt-poor village in eastern India’s Bihar state, farm labourer Renu Devi is an unsung rural supermom who shuttles between home and field every day. But the demure 30-year-old mother does not forget to bring her children to the biannual Vitamin A rounds in Bagwanpur Rati, one of the villages in Vaishali district of Bihar. This is because Vitamin A deficiency is a major...

Is Madhya Pradesh the epicentre of malnutrition deaths? Recently, villages in the State’s Shivpuri district witnessed children of Sahariya tribe falling victims of malnutrition. Their names, according to the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC): Parant, Rajveer, Rajkumari and Sanni and they were all aged 3 years or below. The AHRC cautions that many more children like Ashiq, Kuldeep, Pawan and Malti from the same tribe are battling death due to...

Nearly 2,000 Adivasis and activists demanding forest rights in Nandurbar are under arrest since December 14 in various jails in Maharashtra, but their crime was not that they protested in support of their demands. “When we asked for some corrections in the written reply to our demands, the Collector objected and said we were not withdrawing our agitation. Finally our demand that the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the SIMI [Students Islamic...

Communist Party of India (Marxist) Polit Bureau member Brinda Karat on Tuesday called for a time-bound commission to look into the anomalies in scheduling tribal communities, and pointed out that there was a huge undercounting of their number. “It is not just the question of numbers. Their right to a share of national resources is not recognised because of undercounting,” she said at a protest organised by the National Platform for...