For past several weeks, thousands of farmers in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Chhatisgarh, Rajasthan, Bihar and Jharkhand have been left in the lurch. They had planted urd and til crops in a large acreage, and to their dismay no grain formation took place in the standing crop. Unable to bear the economic loss, at least four farmers have reportedly committed suicide. Thousands of farmers have been pushed deeper into economic distress....

Sonia Gandhi visited a farmer widow's house in August 2004, soon after the UPA came to power. However, this visit did not bring as much change in her life as Rahul Gandhi's visit on July 18, 2008, to Kalawati's house. In fact, the damaged canal that led to the suicide by Ranjana Deshmukh's husband has still not been repaired. The struggles of Kalawati of Yavatmal and Ranjana Deshmukh of Wardha, both...

India’s rapidly growing private microcredit industry faces imminent collapse as almost all borrowers in one of India’s largest states have stopped repaying their loans, egged on by politicians who accuse the industry of earning outsize profits on the backs of the poor. The crisis has been building for weeks, but has now reached a critical stage. Indian banks, which put up about 80 percent of the money that the companies...

The “paid news syndrome” in the media should be resisted as part of a larger struggle for democratic rights because corruption in the media directly affects the health of democracy. The struggle has to be waged in the context of media's corporatisation, monopolistic trends and structural decline. These views emerged at a day-long seminar on “Abridging Freedom and Fairness of the Media: Combating Challenges,” organised by the Rajasthan Working Journalists' Union,...

The poster boy of microfinance is now seeking some anonymity. In Andhra Pradesh, the epicentre of the worst crisis faced by microfinance in India, SKS Microfinance is playing down its identity and going into preservation mode. At its modest office in a residential colony in Warangal district, India’s largest microfinance company has taken down its board. At its head office in upmarket Begumpet in Hyderabad, it hung a cloth mesh...