-Newsclick.in Funding is not keeping pace with demand, and delays or vanished dues are discouraging job seekers in these times of extreme rural distress. Here is a little known but chilling fact about the rural job guarantee scheme, MGNREGS: between April and mid-December this year, about 1.28 crore people who demanded jobs were turned back. This refusal to give work has been happening every year but it has increased after the Modi...

-Down to Earth The schemes Kamal Nath and Bhupesh Baghel announced soon after taking oath will not help those who take loans from money lenders Living up to their poll promises, Kamal Nath and Bhupesh Baghel, the newly elected chief ministers of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, soon after taking oath, announced that their government will waive off farm loans. While the MP government will waive off loans of up to Rs 2...

-The Hindu Charter of demands presented to all parties in Rajasthan for action by next govt. Jaipur: Tribal groups in Rajasthan have demanded that the next elected government in the State reveal the status of each of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with reference to tribal communities and declare their status targets. The activists said that no political party had depicted its commitment to work for sustainable development of tribal people. A manifesto...

-The Hindu Efforts to make agriculture climate-resilient must be scaled up and consolidated The pervasiveness of climatic aberrations and the associated socio-economic vulnerability are now widely recognised and experienced across the globe. The Sixth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on “Global Warming at 1.5°C” distinctly propagates the need to strengthen and enhance existing coping capacity and to remain committed to the objectives of the Paris Agreement. The report...

Just a few days ahead of the Kisan Mukti March in Delhi NCR, the provisional results of the Agriculture Census 2015-16 became available in the public domain. The report, among other things, highlights the long-term problems affecting Indian agriculture including fragmentation of land holdings (particularly the marginal and small ones) and shrinking average size of farm land. The provisional results of the latest Agriculture Census reveal that at the national level...