Will Vijay Mallya commit suicide for running up huge losses at Kingfisher Airlines," asks Talaka Rajiah, a farmer near Parkala town, 35 kilometres from Warangal in Andhra Pradesh's Telangana region. "He will not. The government has already thrown some lifelines for him and the airline sector in the Budget," says Rajiah, who also happens to be the secretary of the Telangana Farmers Association. "But when it comes to farmers the...

Aamra ekhon-o boli ni kon kagoj porte hobe, kintu agami dine kintu setao bole debo. (Till now, we haven’t told which newspapers must be read, but in the future, we will do that as well.) – West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, speaking on March 29 in defense of her government’s decision to bar all but 13 newspapers from more than 2,400 government-approved libraries across the state. “Kunal Ghosh, associate editor...

 When Mamata Banerjee defeated the Communist Party of India (Marxist) last May after 34 years of power in West Bengal, her victory was portrayed by optimists as the beginning of a Kolkata Spring. Free of the communists’ rural thugs and urban heelers, the story went, the state would finally enter the 21st century. One year after Banerjee’s landslide, however, the new boss is looking a lot like the old one —...

Indian agriculture can be transformed into a healthy and vibrant system, where farmers’ suicides are relegated to history. As we enter 2010, the script for a futuristic agriculture which brings back the smile on the face of the Indian farmer, without leaving any scar on the environment, is being rewritten. What began as a small initiative some six years back in a non-descript village in Khamam district, has now spread to over...

-The Telegraph   Farmers in Bengal left around 2.8 lakh hectares uncultivated in the just-concluded boro crop season, a silent expression of no-confidence in the state government’s paddy procurement process and a fallout of rising fertiliser prices. The area cultivated in the boro season (January to end-February) can be considered a barometer for man-made farming systems because farmers largely depend on irrigation during this phase. The bigger aman crop (June to August) still...