-The Times of India   There seems to be no end in sight to the plight of farmers as Nafed, have not yet started procurement of the produce despite the season beginning almost a month back. CCI had earlier announced that it would enter the Cotton trading but changed its stand later saying that it may begin purchases as per the open market trend. This has upset Cotton growers. Lack of agreement between...

-Live Mint   In an unprecedented move, farmers in East Godavari and adjoining districts of Andhra Pradesh declared a crop holiday last season, refusing to cultivate paddy in this fully irrigated region of the state. Farmers say the reason for this drastic step is that cultivating paddy has become unremunerative and they are left with no other choice. The agrarian crisis and its neglect by successive governments are responsible for the low...

Failure of crops due to continuing dry season spells doom in agency The damning trend of farmer suicides seems to have arrived even in the agency areas of Adilabad district following the failure of Cotton crop this season. As many as six of the 13 Cotton farmers to have committed suicide since August 29 belong to the Banjara and Gond tribes. This is the first time when so many suicides among tribal...

Sardarpura, 50 km from Mehsana town and not far from Vadnagar, home of Chief Minister Narendra Modi, had been declared a Samras village, part of one of the first schemes launched by Modi after he took charge in 2001. Under the scheme, a village could appoint its sarpanch unanimously without an election. In Sardarpura, sarpanch Kachra Tribhovan Patel and former sarpanch Kanu Joitaram Patel were among the accused. Both were among...

Chikkamade Gowda had once told the Centre to give him poison. It was better than being evicted from his forest habitat. That was in 1974. Thirty-seven years on, the Soliga tribal and some 16,500 fellow sufferers are celebrating their homecoming, thanks to a landmark central amendment. The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2008, allows them to use nearly 60 per cent of their ancestral land,...