-CivilSocietyOnline.com New Delhi: The 100-day Accountability Yatra across Rajasthan led by the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) has had an impact. The state government has issued orders to re-verify all one million pensions that had been stopped, including the 688,875 pensions that had been cancelled. From December 2015 to March this year the yatra had travelled to 33 districts in Rajasthan to assess how government schemes were functioning, find out people’s grievances...

-The Hindu A crowd funding platform for legal fees, www.azadi.in, is enabling greater ease of access to justice for all. The founders are four young men from Kochi Four young men from Kochi - Radhakrishnan Ram Manohar, Siddharth Vijayan, Praveen Paul and Stalvart John – a couple of years back thought up something that won our hearts – ‘Sisters Across Borders’. Those were hard times in flood-hit Kashmir; aid was pouring in...

-Frontline A noteworthy study that provides much-needed insights into the nature and severity of the farm crisis in Punjab. There have been many studies on agrarian distress and farmer suicides in different parts of India in the last decade, including in Punjab. Most of the studies focus on a profile of the victims, mostly landowning farmers, and reasons thereof, with a sample of such farmers. In this context, this book makes a...

-The Hindu We need to rethink social safety nets in India’s growing economy so that they can also focus on the accidents of life rather than solely on the accidents of birth. Sometimes the grand narratives of the Left and the Right do not seem to have any relationship with the lived experiences of ordinary Indians. For the past two decades, the Left has tried to expand social welfare programmes for the...

-The Hindu Business Line The Government has several short and long-term strategies to achieve self-sufficiency Who can deny that pulses are at the core of the average Indian diet? Therefore, the NDA government’s multi-pronged short-term and long-term strategies to meet the growing consumption of pulses in the country — from importing to increasing production through new technologies, and making cultivation attractive to farmers — is to be welcomed. In fact, pulses play...