-CaravanMagazine.in On 30 May, the dominant caste landowners of Ghanauri Khurd village in Punjab’s Sangrur district organised a meeting of their panchayat. Under the supervision of Rajdeep Kaur, the Sarpanch of the village, they passed a list of resolutions against the wages, welfare and freedom of the primarily Dalit daily-wage labourers of the village. The resolution capped the wages of workers at Rs 3,800 for sowing an acre of paddy and...
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Punjab: Labour Shortage in Lockdown Reveals Fissures in Farm Economy Ahead of Paddy Sowing Season -Vivek Gupta
-TheWire.in Panchayats and labour workforce unions have openly traded barbs over a move to cap paddy transplant wages in several villages. Chandigarh: “This time paddy transplant rates in our village will not be more than Rs 2,700 per acre. If anyone pays more than what is decided, he will be fined Rs 5,000,” said an elderly man, as he addressed a gathering in Gharyala Kurd village in Punjab’s Taran Taran district, approximately...
More »Responding to COVID-19 at the grassroots -TR Raghunandan
-The Hindu Kerala and Karnataka have shown how democratic decentralisation has worked in their favour Mahatma Gandhi envisioned that a free India would rest on a foundation of gram panchayats, village republics that governed locally and epitomised Swaraj in practice. B.R. Ambedkar was sceptical; he described the caste-ridden, unequal village society as a cesspool. Yet, he was not unequivocally against decentralisation. Locally relevant initiatives The 73rd Constitutional Amendment mandates the constitution of panchayats at...
More »Rajasthan: Thousands of crop insurance claims denied as premium 'Refunded' -Shruti Jain
-TheWire.in The Agriculture Insurance Company of India returned farmers' premiums after one year, claiming that details had not been provided in "soft copy". The bank, however, has not credited the refund into farmers' accounts. Satlana (Jodhpur, Rajasthan): Thousands of farmers in the Satlana gram panchayat of Rajasthan’s Jodhpur, insured under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), have been denied insurance claims for two crop seasons – kharif 2016 and kharif 2017. The...
More »Will 1,646 fodder camps for 11 lakh cattle count in Maharashtra polls? -Harish Damodaran & Parthasarathi Biswas
-The Indian Express Out of the 1,646 fodder camps, the maximum were opened in Beed (549, with 3.49 lakh animals), Ahmednagar (507 and 3.34 lakh), Solapur (248 and 1.75 lakh) and Osmanabad (92 and 0.85 lakh) districts. Pune/ Solapur: The southwest monsoon season is over, but Kakaso Gaikwad’s “chara chavani” (fodder camp) still has 540 animals. At its peak — from late-April till almost the end of September — there were...
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