While the revolutionary National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme has brought higher wages for labourers across the country, farmers and landlords in Tamil Nadu have begun to feel the pinch following its huge success. They don't get labourers to work in their fields due to low wages. Will the new choice force landlords to hike wages? Rural Tamil Nadu is witnessing a critical migration of labour. Farm workers, 80% of who...

Soon after the monsoon was over, rains made unseasonal comeback in Nashik and nearby areas again on Diwali day. As days passed, the initial surprise turned into shock as it rained night after night, and by Sunday it had rained 525mm in November. Heavy showers and thunderstorms all over the district damaged the crops so much that nothing of the rabi (winter) crop remains. Vineyards have thrown away young berries at...

A lot has been said and written about the visit of Barack Obama, the President of USA to India. The corporate media was in the usual over-enthusiastic drive to bring to its readers and viewers all minute details about his visit from where he stayed and what he ate to how many warships, planes and cars accompanied him and how a whopping $200 million was spent per day for the...

At least 29 of the 66 migrants crushed to death in east Delhi when a building collapsed on Monday night hailed from Bengal. The figure signposts the exodus of an abandoned generation and the inability of a state to retain its young or equip them for a better life elsewhere. The death of so many Bengalis has brought out in the open troubling issues that policymakers — both in the state...

West Bengal's farmers switched to new scientific material called 'Poly Mulching' (made out of plastic) to protect crops. The North Bengal region has got some highly fertile agricultural land. But weeds, lack of proper sunlight, heavy downpour, soil erosion, seed germination and cold weather conditions often result in harming the crops and ultimately curtailing agricultural production. However, to protect crops from such problems, farmers have now found a suitable way by using...