-TheWire.in In 2018, farmers, who had been denied insurance claims after the Agriculture Insurance Company of India refunded their premiums, filed a PIL before the Rajasthan high court. Jaipur: After almost three years of legal battle against a public sector insurance company and a state-run co-operative bank that arbitrarily denied them insurance claims under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), farmers in Rajasthan’s Jodhpur have finally received their share of claims...

-The Telegraph The government has not institutionalized SAUs which are at times intimidated when it comes to accessing data on various programmes The auditing agility of government programmes seems to have gained strength. After the recent floods in Assam, the state planned to carry out a social audit of relief measures to look into corruption and bribery. This is the first time that any government is trying to reinforce a social audit...

-The Indian Express Twenty-six villages in Pardi taluka fall under the Kaprada Assembly seat. Tarmaliya, with around 700 voters, is located in the most interior parts of the constituency. Rajkot, Surat: AROUND 40 students at Tarmaliya village in Pardi taluka of Valsad district, which falls in Kaprada Assembly constituency, boycotted the by-elections Tuesday for want of a mobile tower. In the absence of a mobile tower, the students claimed, they had to...

-IndiaSpend.com Patna: The first time she heard of a woman leading a village in Bihar as its mukhiya (head), Ramvati Devi (name changed), 50, was astounded. “I couldn’t even comprehend how a woman could lead. How could she have any power over a man or the dominant castes in a village where she had walked all her life with her head covered?” she told IndiaSpend on a recent October day. In 2006,...

-Down to Earth The time to put off the inevitable question about human relationship to nature is long past. Our assumption that we can control and modify nature without repercussions is a fallacy Lofty mountains that touch the azure skies, gentle hills clothed in dense tropical forests and evergreen valleys — the Western Ghats nurture a variety of ecosystems not found in any other part of the world. Spread over 164,280 square kilometres,...