-The Times of India NEW DELHI: About a quarter of India's districts are witnessing mass protests over land acquisition issues according to a study. It identified 252 land conflicts spread over 165 districts, spanning practically all states of the country, in 2013-14. This is an increase of over 40% over 2012 when an earlier study had recorded 177 disputes in 130 districts. This incendiary situation is the reason behind the bitter debate...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: In a landmark judgment, the Bombay high court has paved the way for the state to pay higher compensation to farmers whose land it acquires for public projects. The court held that financial constraints or project cost escalations cannot be a reason to shortchange farmers and set aside a government decision to fix a multiplier factor of 1.1 on market rates even though the law says...

-Economic and Political Weekly While the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Act 2001 is a progressive piece of legislation that recognises farmers' rights to seed, it demands payment of an annual maintenance fee by the farmers to protect the varieties which they have been cultivating and conserving for years, only because these varieties have been brought under legal protection through national legislation. Parameswaran Prajeesh (prajeesh@mssrf.res.in) is a researcher with the...

-The Indian Express The political discourse over land acquisition has proceeded in binary terms - industry versus farmer, growth versus no growth - thereby obfuscating the real issue at the heart of the land acquisition debate: the fear of arbitrary exercise of state power in reshaping property relations in Indian society. Instead of tweaking the 2015 land acquisition bill with a few amendments here and there to appease political allies and...

-The Telegraph Bhubaneswar: Growing unemployment has come to haunt the Naveen Patnaik government with the number of jobless persons in the state crossing the 10lakh figure. Official statistics show that more than 10.86 lakh jobless persons had registered with the 80 state-run employment exchanges in 2013. Of these, 8,034 were technical graduates, including 6,093 engineering graduates and 303 technical postgraduates. The figure reveals the plight of the state's educated youth as 1.7 crore...