The peasants’ organisations of the four Left parties in West Bengal have called the Mamata Banerjee government “insensitive” to the plight of farmers and have decided to mobilise them to launch a campaign. The state government is already under fire from the farmers’ community for failing to procure paddy at the minimum support price (MSP) and provide jobs under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS). The CPM’s peasants’...

On a wall on Station Road, among posters of Khoonkar Darinde and The Dirty Picture, Amitabh Bachchan looks out of a row of yellow-and-red posters and says, “Do boond har baar.” Here in Moradabad, the town in western Uttar Pradesh that till recently exported, besides its intricate brassware, strains of the deadly polio virus, the posters have been around for long. The writing on the wall was clear: this was...

India seems to have arrived at the threshold of polio eradication, but should it lower its guard? ON January 13, India achieved what had only two years ago seemed impossible in the immediate term. The country, which, given the epidemiological data in the new millennium, had come to be regarded by health experts around the world as one that would be the last to achieve freedom from polio (poliomyelitis), recorded no...

While Governor M K Narayanan has also put the weight of his office behind the growing concern over farmer suicides in West Bengal, the Mamata Banerjee government seems determined to play these down. In Burdwan, the state’s rice bowl, where 18 of the 27 deaths have been reported in the past four months, the district administration has been approaching families of victims for written statements saying the suicides had nothing to...

Farmers across the country are entitled to get Rs 1,080 a quintal (100kg) asminimum support price for paddy. But surprisingly, a team from the Centre that visited Bihar and Uttar Pradesh last week found that theFood Corporation of India (FCI) was paying nearly 30% less. With little procurement taking place in these states, farmers have been left with no option but to go for distress sale. The result: In procurement centres...