-News18.com Acclaimed journalist and Founder-Editor of the People’s Archive of Rural India, P Sainath attributes the existential crisis confronting India’s agrarian society to macro-economic policies set in motion 25 years ago. Talking to Anuradha SenGupta, Sainath makes a case for state intervention in agriculture and says the Modi government, with its shifting positions and policies like demonetisation has only aggravated the assault on agrarian livelihoods. Dismissing the buzz about imminent new initiatives...

-Livemint.com Declining income, shrinking farmlands, rise in number of dependents on existing holdings add to farm woes Bengaluru: Since 2000, Karnataka has put nearly 200,000 hectares of farmland to non-agricultural use, including for industrial, residential and infrastructure projects. Besides shrinking farmlands, the number of dependents on existing land holdings have also increased considering little employment opportunities elsewhere. From 1.312 million hectares in 2000-01 (cumulative), the total land put to non-agricultural use has risen...

-The Indian Express “Incomes” not rising, due to low crop prices and stagnating wages, has more than offset any “asset” gains in the recent period, which also probably explains the party’s heavy losses in the three states it ruled, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. New Delhi: The big rural economy takeaway for the BJP from the just-concluded assembly elections is that mere asset creation — building roads, houses and toilets or...

-The Hindu Business Line ‘GDP growth rates for 2004-11 were bound to come down’ New Delhi: “You can slice and dice the data anyway you want, but India’s GDP growth rates between 2004 and 2011 were bound to come down in the backcasting computation effort,” said TCA Anant, former Chief Statistician of India. When the new base year of 2011-12 came out, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) had documented and recognised that the...

-The Indian Express New education report: Muslims, disabled most under-represented. While the proportion of upper-caste students in higher education institutions is still considerably higher than their share in the population, for the first time ever their “erstwhile near-monopoly” is being eroded with their percentage share falling to below 50 per cent over the last few years, according to a study. Advertising All other groups, women, Other Backward Classes (OBC), Scheduled Castes (SC), and...