-The Hindu Behind lynching lies the vicious idea that goodness is possessed by one group alone and all others who do not have it or stray from it are enemies to be conquered Group violence unleashed upon an alleged transgressor is always spurred by a complex interplay of interest, prejudice and power. The Bulandshahr lynchings of a police officer and a youth were not spontaneous reactions to grave wrongdoing by a hastily...

-Livemint.com The recent Chhath festival in Bihar saw a visible thinning of the workforce in Kerala, clearly the ground zero of India’s mass labour movement Eroor (Ernakulam): Oh, I miss Vicky!,” Ravi says, in Malayalam, as he rolls up his sleeves. He is walking quickly back to his house from a protest—that quintessential Kerala activity. Breathing in the pungent chemicals of Kochi’s industrial belt in Eroor as he walks, Ravi (who did...

-The Indian Express Forcing machinery on farmers without giving a thought to the economics of their utilisation can prove counter-productive. There are three main impediments to farm mechanisation in India. The first is cost, which, for a standard 50-horsepower tractor, today averages around Rs 6.5-6.8 lakh. But a tractor is just a source of power and traction, and only as good as the farm implements it can pull. The most basic tractor-drawn tiller/cultivator...

-Scroll.in Providing them machinery to remove loose straw and expanding the industries that use crop residue could help tackle the problem, says a new study. It is that time of the year. Delhi’s air is becoming poisonous and, once again, Punjab’s farmers burning paddy straw are being blamed for it. But few bother to ask why these farmers dispose of their crop residue in such a polluting way even though the risk...

-Livemint.com Since the paddy straw cannot be used as animal feed, farmers set fire to it to get the field ready for the next crop of wheat New Delhi: On a balmy evening last week, Sandeep Singhroha, a farmer from Haryana’s Karnal district, set fire to a pile of paddy stubble with a matchstick and then dragged the pile across his field with a garden fork. Soon, the two-acre plot was up...