The farmer in picture committed Suicide 18 months ago An advertisement released by the Bharatiya Janata Party government in Karnataka in its campaign for the coming taluk and zilla elections has put it in a spot. The advertisement, published in some Kannada newspapers on December 19, shows a ‘happy' farmer harvesting sugarcane and another driving a tractor. It claims that the “doors of his fortune opened after the BJP came to...

IT WAS a windfall five years ago that taught Panchali Satyavva the power of a lie. It happened one Monday afternoon in Someshwar village of Nizamabad district in Andhra Pradesh. It was raining in sheets and she had just placed a bucket under the steady trickle of water from the roof of her hut. Two men were at her door, holding umbrellas and offering her an unsolicited Rs. 5,000. They...

If present political trends and shifts in Andhra Pradesh intensify, the State could see an election within a year. And not just over Telangana. When Chandrababu Naidu sits on a hunger fast for suffering farmers, you know something is afoot in Andhra Pradesh. Excessive rains have devastated the crops in the State. And losses have been enormous. But a farmer losing over Rs.15,000 on an acre of paddy will get less...

After Andhra Pradesh, damaged crops coupled with the fear of defaulting on loan repayment has come to haunt growers in Madhya Pradesh. In the first case of Suicide by a farmer in the state in recent times, a 35-year-old agriculturist of Harrai village in Damoh district ended his life by consuming insecticide on Wednesday. Nandlal Yadav, the farmer, was depressed after the failure of two successive crops. In Andhra Pradesh,...

Farmers in Maharashtra's Vidarbha region have urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to sack Vilasrao Deshmukh as Union Heavy Industries Minister, after the Supreme Court ruled he misused his authority to protect a Congress legislator's money-lender father who charge exorbitant interest rates. "Local legislators are getting police protection with the help of top leaders and are exploiting the debt-trapped farmers who are committing Suicide," Kishor Tiwari, president of Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti,...