-The Business Standard A CACP study shows how the Fisc, rising farm wages and international forces are stoking inflation It's good to see that independent thought is still present in the government. When one part of the government comes out with a serious and objective piece on how the government itself has been responsible for creating food inflation, hopefully the government is more likely to take note. The Commission for Agricultural Costs and...

-Frontline The Land Acquisition Bill runs into a roadblock as political parties fail to reach an agreement on the substantive features of the draft Bill or on the amendments proposed. The efforts of the United Progressive Alliance government to broker a consensus on the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2012, which has been pending for over a year, have not paid off not because...

-Live Mint Farmers resisting India's biggest FDI deal are paying a heavy price for their stand In June 2005, the Orissa government signed the country's biggest foreign direct investment deal yet with the South Korean steel manufacturer Posco for a $12 billion (around `65,856 crore) plant near Paradip in the mineral-rich state. Livelihoods in eight existing agricultural and fishing villages were to give way for the project that was intended to be...

-Bloomberg The corpse of Indian farmer Bengali Singh burned to ash atop a blazing funeral pyre on the banks of the river Ganges in 2006. Five years later, the dead man was recorded as being paid by India's $33 billion rural jobs program to dig an irrigation canal in Jharkhand state. Officials in his village and the surrounding region used at least 500 identities, including those of Singh, a disabled child of...

-The Economic Times The government wants to train the rural youth to take up manufacturing jobs, but an official survey has shown that nearly a fifth of youth in the countryside enrolled for vocational training opted to learn driving or become car mechanics in the hope of earning a decent salary in cities. Computer training was the second-most desired skill among the rural youth, shows a report based on the National Sample...