-TheWire.in To oppose the forest department’s plan to limit open grazing, the pastoral community is formally pursuing their collective land rights through the Forest Rights Act. The sun has not yet decided to rise. It’s pitch black out but a group of Maldharis has already assembled for the last session of this year’s milking competition. Their massive buffalos are majestically adorned with intricate garlands and colourful necklaces. The panch (group of five...

-Frontline.in To rural India, which is already reeling under multiple crises, demonetisation has come as yet another blow. WHEN the Prime Minister made the decision to withdraw Rs.500 and Rs.1,000 notes, he did not quite factor in the impact it would have on agriculture. Despite the rhetoric the concept of digital wallets has not yet entered rural India unlike in much of the country’s urban areas, and much of rural and...

-The Hindu With grocers and cold storage owners refusing to accept scrapped currency notes, farmers are struggling to get potato seeds while landless labourers are forced to forgo their food. Chitra Bag and her family of six are eating less these days. They make do with one meal instead of the usual three meals, despite a gruelling 8-10 hours of work daily as landless farm labourers. Even though vegetables, grown around their...

-Livemint.com Several Bundelkhand farmers contend that demonetisation is a direct attack on the class divide and has reduced the rising gap between the rich and the poor New Delhi: In April this year, before the monsoon set in on parched Bundelkhand, Ajay Tripathi was witness to countless cattle deaths and fellow villagers migrating in hordes to escape the aftermath of consecutive years of drought. For the young farmer from Uttar Pradesh’s Mahoba...

-Livemint.com The discourse in the state treats all farmers—small, medium, big, irrigated and rain-fed—as a homogeneous entity, ignoring differences in the severity of their problems Sharad Pawar breached an unwritten rule of Maharashtra politics. Recently, he spoke about the woes of small farmers, albeit those in the irrigated belt. He regretted that a sugarcane farmer of barely two acres of land is often viewed as a rich farmer and that too, rather...