-The Hindu Rue the use of unaccounted money in next month’s Assembly Elections New Delhi: Activists working for electoral reforms said they were disappointed on Monday when the Supreme Court declined to stay the electoral bond scheme of the government, saying that the anonymous donations to political parties through these bonds could continue for the Delhi Assembly Elections next month. A founder of the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), which had filed a...

-Down to Earth Without empowering women in farming by recognising them as farmers and giving them land rights, agriculture can’t be sustained and so can’t the economy In Maharashtra’s 2019 Assembly Elections, the Vidarbha constituencies presented interesting trends. The region is important politically not just for the stalwarts who contest from there, but also for the development issues it represents. More than three lakh farmers have committed suicide in India between 1991 and...

-The Hindu The AAP will hope that the Assembly polls are a referendum on its government’s work Delhi, the Union Territory (UT) that hosts India’s capital city, might lag behind several States in total population and in area, but it enjoys outsize significance in terms of media and political attention. With 1.47 crore electors spread across the largely metropolitan national capital region and its pockets of rural voters in some suburbs, Delhi...

-The Hindu Business Line The PM-Kisan as a tool to prop up sagging rural demand, recording of tenancy to help the real cultivators and streamlining of agricultural subsidies could be three important themes for Indian agriculture in 2020. With the defeat in the Assembly Elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh in December 2018, the Government realised that to win rural votes in the General Elections in May 2019, it needed to...

-Hindustan Times Jharkhand is a mandate of the poor, for their rights The verdict for the Jharkhand assembly is, first and foremost, a verdict in favour of a new localism, and is a reflection of people’s voice overwhelming the arena of state elections in India. One key issue, which helps frame the meaning of the verdict, is the struggle of adivasis against purported amendments to their land rights by the Raghubar Das-led Bharatiya...