-Newsclick.in Caste discrimination percolates down to the food plates for Musahar community in Madhepura district of Bihar reports Neha Dixit "The mahant of the Shankar Math told me to stay away from ultra-Left people the day I questioned the Collector about the hunger deaths in my village," recounts Prabhansh Manjhi. Prabhansh is from the Musahaar community in Madhepura district of Bihar. Estimated to be 2.3 million in the country, they are Mahadalits, one...

-The Economic Times KOLKATA: West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee's plan to start a savings scheme with the aim of protecting the poor from losing their money to deposit schemes that promise high returns will be going ahead with the Reserve Bank of India having cleared the participation of state-run Banks in the programme. The state government is to launch the plan on November 6. State-run West Bengal Infrastructure Development Finance Corporation...

-The Economic Times KOLKATA/ GUWAHATI: Mamata Banerjee's decision to stop movement of potatoes from the state has made the tuber go beyond the reach of common people in states of Odisha, Bihar, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh and the entire north-east. Prices have touched the roof in most of these states with people in Assam buying a kilo of potatoes at Rs 45. Traders say that in the last two days, price of...

-The Economic Times KOLKATA: Eastern and North Eastern states, which grapple with acute storage deficit, will get a priority in fund allocation for setting up warehouses, National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Nabard ) said. States with food deficits like Jammu and Kashmir will also receive a priority treatment. The government has directed Nabard to treat these states favourably to cut farm losses amid implementation of the world's biggest population feeding...

-Review of Agrarian Studies This paper ar­gues that mech­a­ni­sa­tion of In­dian agri­cul­ture, as mea­sured by growth in the pro­duc­tion and sale of trac­tors, has con­tin­ued, al­though not uni­formly, over the last two decades. While the last two decades were a pe­riod of slow­down in agri­cul­tural pro­duc­tion, the data do not sup­port a view of un­dif­fer­en­ti­ated eco­nomic de­cline in rural areas. Our focus on trac­tors is jus­ti­fied as the In­dian agri­cul­tural sec­tor...