-Kafila.org With depressing regularity, the newspapers have been reporting farmers' suicides in many states. Recently, P Sainath wrote on BBC that around 296,438 farmers have committed suicide since 1995. He also mentions that cash crop cultivators of cotton, sugar cane, vanilla, pepper, groundnut etc account for the bulk of those suicides. According to a PIL heard by the Supreme Court in December 2014, around 3146 farmers in Maharashtra have committed suicide...

-Business Standard Former rural development minister Jairam Ramesh tells Sanjeeb Mukherjee that the Ordinance to amend the land acquisition Act (2013) opens the door for forcible acquisition and undermines the spirit and the substance of the legislation. Edited excerpts: * An oft-repeated argument given by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government to justify bringing an Ordinance to amend the land acquisition Act (2013) passed by your government is that many Congress-ruled states...

-The Indian Express Mumbai: Even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced Friday that his government won't cut subsidies for the poor, it has now come to light that the BJP-Shiv Sena government in Maharashtra has already silently discontinued the food subsidy for nearly 2 crore people in the state. According to sources, the Devendra Fadnavis government has decided to discontinue supply of subsidised food grains to 1.77 crore people who were...

-The Hindu Business Line To buck migration, the Barefoot College has turned to mothers and grandmothers to light up villages Satabhaya village, in Kendrapada district of Odisha, is barely 65 km from the district headquarters, but it can be called remote by any yardstick. Located inside the Bhitarkanika wildlife sanctuary, it remains deprived of basic facilities such as roads and electricity. Abutted by the Bay of Bengal, the village is the only one...

-The Telegraph Jaipur: At least two sitting women village heads in Rajasthan would have to watch from the sidelines when rural polls get under way tomorrow after the high court today refused to stay an ordinance that has fixed minimum educational qualifications for contestants. A bench of Chief Justice Sunil Ambawani and Justice Prakash Gupta said courts couldn't interfere once the notification had been issued and the election process set in motion. The...