-Livemint.com Except people in high-income countries, most of the world cannot afford the fruits and vegetables they need, according to research in ‘Lancet’ New Delhi: Three in four Indians are yet to taste the fruits of economic growth—or indeed, its veggies. Recent research published in the British medical journal Lancet calculates fruit and vegetable intake among people of different countries, on the basis of gross national income per person. The research finds that the...

-Frontline A noteworthy study that provides much-needed insights into the nature and severity of the farm crisis in Punjab. There have been many studies on agrarian distress and farmer suicides in different parts of India in the last decade, including in Punjab. Most of the studies focus on a profile of the victims, mostly landowning farmers, and reasons thereof, with a sample of such farmers. In this context, this book makes a...

-BBC Four years ago, a group of upper-caste men arrived at Mehul Vinodbhai Kabira's modest two-room home in Gujarat and threatened to burn it down. Bhayla is a nondescript village of around 450 low slung brick-and-cement homes straddling a highway dotted by pharmaceutical, engineering and bio-tech factories. Most of the homes in this dense village are owned by land-owning upper castes, but around 70 belong to Dalits (formerly known as untouchables) like Mr...

-The Hindu The Maharashtra government’s decision to promulgate an ordinance this week to exempt farmers from having to mandatorily sell their fruit and vegetable crop at mandis governed by a 1963 law on marketing farm produce, is a bold and laudable step. That Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has stood his ground against the powerful lobby of middlemen, who shut shop in protest, is even more commendable. The problem with the present...

-The Indian Express Housing activists say that a heavy reliance on private sector is the prime reason for poor pace of implementation of the PMAY New Delhi: A year after Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) with the stated purpose of constructing two crore houses for the urban poor by 2022—at the rate of 30 lakh houses per year— merely 1,623 houses have been constructed so far. The...