-Down to Earth Without empowering women in farming by recognising them as farmers and giving them land rights, agriculture can’t be sustained and so can’t the economy In Maharashtra’s 2019 Assembly Elections, the Vidarbha constituencies presented interesting trends. The region is important politically not just for the stalwarts who contest from there, but also for the development issues it represents. More than three lakh farmers have committed suicide in India between 1991 and...

-The Hindu The AAP will hope that the Assembly polls are a referendum on its government’s work Delhi, the Union Territory (UT) that hosts India’s capital city, might lag behind several States in total population and in area, but it enjoys outsize significance in terms of media and political attention. With 1.47 crore electors spread across the largely metropolitan national capital region and its pockets of rural voters in some suburbs, Delhi...

-The Hindu Business Line The PM-Kisan as a tool to prop up sagging rural demand, recording of tenancy to help the real cultivators and streamlining of agricultural subsidies could be three important themes for Indian agriculture in 2020. With the defeat in the Assembly Elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh in December 2018, the Government realised that to win rural votes in the General Elections in May 2019, it needed to...

-Hindustan Times Jharkhand is a mandate of the poor, for their rights The verdict for the Jharkhand assembly is, first and foremost, a verdict in favour of a new localism, and is a reflection of people’s voice overwhelming the arena of state elections in India. One key issue, which helps frame the meaning of the verdict, is the struggle of adivasis against purported amendments to their land rights by the Raghubar Das-led Bharatiya...

-The Indian Express The data shows that Maharashtra accounted for almost 40 per cent of all farmer suicides in the country in 2016. Karnataka (1,212) was second on the list but still recorded 50 per cent less farmers’ suicides than Maharashtra. After withholding data on incidents of lynchings, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) has released figures on farmers’ suicides but with a key element from the previous edition missing this...