Nearly 2 lakh farmers committed suicide in India since 1997. The share of big five states accounted for 1,22,823 suicides in this 12 year period. The data compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau points out that 16,196 farmers in India ended their life in 2008. K Nagaraj, an economist, in his report Farmers' suicides in India: Magnitude, Trends and Spatial Patterns, says, "The title to land was taken as the...

The World Wildlife Fund has warned that days are numbered for much of the sensitive Sunderbans eco-system and in 60 years vast tracts of the rare mangrove forests, home to the Bengal tiger, will be inundated by the rising sea. The study, focussed on Sunderbans in Bangladesh, says the sea was rising more swiftly than anticipated by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 and would rise 11.2 inches...

The Left parties would raise a demand to scrap the “archaic” Land Acquisition Act, 1884, as it facilitated land acquisition by big corporates, who took advantage of the acute distress of farmers, Communist Party of India (Marxist) Polit Bureau member Brinda Karat said here on Sunday. “Why are they [the Centre] delaying the scrapping of the Act?” she said. “There is utter hypocrisy in land reforms and distribution in the country.”...

Institutions will need to protect not just female employees but even women visiting office premises from sexual harassment under new, last-minute changes to India’s proposed law against sex pests at the workplace. The changes proposed by the women and child development ministry cover victims, not working, where they face sexual harassment from an employee, protecting girls visiting their parents’ offices or women atheletes training at sports camps. The law ministry...

The Centre has finalised guidelines that pave the way for a wide range of works on private land under the rural job scheme. The beneficiaries will be small and marginal farmers across all categories, Scheduled Castes and Tribes and families below the poverty line (BPL). The list of works under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) is likely to include construction of wells, ponds, ground-water works, levelling and shaping of...