-TheWire.in At a time when food has provided so much grist for the identitarian and nativist mill, it is important to infuse into public discourse a modicum of reason through facts. For long, India has been mythologised as a vegetarian, and particularly beef-eschewing, society. Such a representation has further been ideologically explained (and justified) by a wide range of scholars, politicians and popular discourse by constructing India as a society primarily shaped...

-The Hindu Doctors say there ought to be an audit of C-section deliveries in private and public health facilities In its new guidelines, the World Health Organization (WHO) has called for the elimination of the so-called ‘one-centimetre-per-hour’ benchmark — a rule of thumb that obstetricians use to determine whether a delivery requires surgical intervention. This is to counter what the body calls a “surge” in interventions such as caesarean sections that could...

-Hindustan Times A newer generation of politicians has again voiced the demand of giving land to landless Dalit households as a means to resolve the crisis of rural livelihoods. But the relentless pursuit of neo-liberal economic policies and liberalisation has rendered most of these demands Utopian Seven decades after Independence, while a majority of farmers cultivate their own land (however small their holdings may be), most Dalit farmers in much of India...

-The Times of India There is a saying in Harendragarh, a tribal village 50 km from Rajasthan’s Banswara town, that if a man eats the last rotla (chapatti) he will fall ill. So by default the last rotla, thinner than the rest and made from leftover dough along with the stale remains of the dal or vegetable made that day, would land on the plate of the woman of the house....

-PTI Director of CUTS International, George Cheriyan said that the consumption of chemical fertilisers in the country has been increasing along with level of agriculture production. Just 19 per cent farmers are practicing organic farming in Rajasthan even as 91 per cent were aware of the ill-effects of chemical farming, a survey has revealed. The fact came to the fore in a baseline survey conducted by CUTS International among 1,795 consumers,  644 farmers...