-The Hindu Business Line It scores over loan waivers as it benefits all farmers and gives them more control over the cultivation and sale of their produce There is an illusion across various quarters that a one-time farm loan waiver can remove all the hardships farmers have been going through over the last 15 years or so. This illusion has been occupying more space in public discourse in recent months because of...

-Frontline.in Interview with Aruna Roy. ARUNA ROY is a well-known social and political activist. A former Indian Administrative Service officer, she resigned from the IAS in 1975 and has since worked with the most oppressed in society. Aruna Roy’s observation on government service is indicative of her future concerns: “Everyone calls it an elite service; I always felt the discourse should be a bit better than what it was. I was shocked...

-News18.com Acclaimed journalist and Founder-Editor of the People’s Archive of Rural India, P Sainath attributes the existential crisis confronting India’s agrarian society to macro-economic policies set in motion 25 years ago. Talking to Anuradha SenGupta, Sainath makes a case for state intervention in agriculture and says the Modi government, with its shifting positions and policies like demonetisation has only aggravated the assault on agrarian livelihoods. Dismissing the buzz about imminent new initiatives...

  In its 2014 election manifesto, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), among other things, promised to "take steps to enhance the profitability in agriculture, by ensuring a minimum of 50% profits over the cost of production". In his 2018-19 Union budget speech too, the Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley informed the Parliament that the 2014 election manifesto of the BJP had stated that the farmers should get at least 1.5 times the...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The health ministry was actively mulling compulsory licensing, apart from price capping, of “orphan drugs” (for rare diseases), when the department of pharmaceuticals abruptly issued an order exempting such medicines from Price Control, derailing plans to make these drugs affordable. The health ministry discussed price capping and invoking compulsory licence for these “exorbitantly” priced “orphan drugs” at a meeting on January 3, the day when DoP...