-The Telegraph New Delhi: Amid cow vigilantism, a professor of economics specialising in agrarian issues today wondered aloud whether those demanding a nationwide ban on cow slaughter had thought about its fallout, more so as a beginning had been made with the restrictions on the sale of animals for slaughter at cattle markets. A calculation by professor Vikas Rawal of the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at Jawaharlal Nehru University's School...

-GovernanceNow.com As farmers protests take centre stage across the country, Swaraj Party convenor explains the ecological, economic and existential crisis behind this unrest. * We have recently seen farmers from Tamil Nadu protesting in the national capital. Then Maharashtra farmers protested, deciding not to send their produce to cities. The agitation has now reached Madhya Pradesh, leading to killings. Why there is sudden farmers’ unrest in the country? I think we...

-HuffingtonPost.com A safety net for the poorest and most vulnerable populations. Recently there has been a lot of debate in academic and policy circles about mainstreaming climate concerns in development programs in order to build the resilience of vulnerable communities. One such development initiative is the Mahatma Gandhi National Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), whose main objective is to reduce rural poverty by providing a legal guarantee of 100 days' paid labour...

-VillageSquare.in People living in villages, who are migrating in large numbers to urban spaces in search of livelihoods, could be victims of our economic development or perhaps the dismal income growth of farm households is semi-deliberate to keep labor costs low Till about 1990 since Independence, our country followed what may be broadly termed an import-substitution strategy for economic growth. This meant high import duties and rigid non-tariff barriers on imports and...

-Livemint.com The richest household’s assets are worth much more than that of all the others combined and the same conclusion holds if we take the distribution of rural assets We all know that Credit Suisse reckons that the richest 1% of Indians own 58.4% of the nation’s wealth, up from 36.8% in 2000. What is perhaps not so well-known is that, according to the Credit Suisse report, the bottom 70% of Indians...