-The Tribune A farmer ends his life every 30 minutes in India. There are some who don’t end up in this pile of statistics and are saved through timely action of family and friends. Ramrao Panchleniwar, a cotton grower in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region, is one such survivor. He wished to drown his financial worries in two bottles of insecticide in 2014. In this book titled after him, Ramrao’s life and near-death...

-The Hindu Landslides kill 49 in Raigad; rescue efforts hampered. At least 60 persons have lost their lives in landslides triggered by intense rain in western Maharashtra and the coastal Konkan region as monsoon fury continued unabated over the region on Friday. While the entire State, including the normally arid Marathwada and Vidarbha regions, have been receiving particularly heavy showers over the last 72 hours, the situation remained particularly grim in the Mahad...

-Economic and Political Weekly Farmer suicides are an unfortunate result of the agrarian distress plaguing the rural economy of many states of the country. Marathwada and Vidarbha regions in Maharashtra have recorded very high numbers of farmer suicides, and an attempt to calculate the number of suicides and the suicide mortality rate is the first step towards gaining an in-depth understanding of the prevalence and seriousness of the issue. An analysis...

-RuralIndiaOnline.org Huge quantities of cash crops lie unsold across India – like cotton in Maharashtra. A hunger crisis looms, yet farmers in Vidarbha plan to sow cotton, not food crops, once again this kharif season Seventy-year-old Kisan Sakhru Pawar, patriarch of a joint farming family in Maharashtra’s Yavatmal district, is very anxious. The climbing Covid-19 graph is not the main reason for his anxiety. His concern: unsold cotton. “We have 350 quintals of cotton,...

-PTI/ The Telegraph They were booked under the Prevention of Corruption Act Nagpur: One more FIR, naming five Maharashtra government officials, was registered on Wednesday by the Nagpur unit of the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) in the multi-crore irrigation scam. Five officials of Vidarbha Irrigation Development Corporation (VIDC), some of them now retired, were booked under the Prevention of Corruption Act at the Sadar police station here, an ACB statement said on late Wednesday...