-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...

-TheNewsMinute.com Shilpa Prabhakar Satish, who became the district’s first woman collector when she took charge in May 2018, says her daughter enjoys going to the anganwadi daily. At a time when parents across the state are in deep discussions over which play school to admit their wards in the coming summer, Tirunelveli’s first woman collector, Shilpa Prabhakar Satish, has chosen a government run anganwadi for her daughter. And the 2009 batch...

  In its 2014 election manifesto, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), among other things, promised to "take steps to enhance the profitability in agriculture, by ensuring a minimum of 50% profits over the cost of production". In his 2018-19 Union budget speech too, the Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley informed the Parliament that the 2014 election manifesto of the BJP had stated that the farmers should get at least 1.5 times the...

-The Economic Times Despite substantial increase in agriculture production and productivity levels over the years, farmers’ indebtedness has not changed significantly. According to the National Bank for Agriculture and rural Development (Nabard) All India rural Financial Inclusion Survey (Nafis) 2016-17, 52.5% of agricultural households were indebted. Considerable efforts have been taken in channelising institutional credit to farmers and raising farm credit disbursement targets, with allocations increasing by Rs 1 lakh crore in...

-The Economic Times Even though the scheme had been ranked as the world's largest public works programme by the World Bank, it is being systematically undermined with illegal restrictions on its budget allocation, severe payment delays and low wages. Mahatma Gandhi National rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) has been a tried and tested measure to target rising unemployment and ease rural distress in the country. The rural Employment programme, which guarantees 100...