-The Hindu Business Line Urban-rural wage gap highest in the North-East and northern States New Delhi: That rural employment, particularly in the informal sector, will fetch lower incomes, does not always hold true. In fact, hired workers in the informal sector in rural Gujarat earned twice as much as their counterparts in urban areas, a recent report of the National Sample Survey Organisation show. Hired workers in rural Gujarat’s informal sectors earned about...

-The Tribune Punjab Govt looks other way, says no record of landless agri workers’ debt Chandigarh: While the Punjab Government dithers on providing debt relief to landless labourers, a new report suggests the number of suicides committed by landless agricultural labourers due to debt is much higher than those by farmers in the state. The “census report” commissioned by the Punjab Government on rural suicides takes into account incidences between 2010 and 2016...

-BusinessWorld.in There simply are no easy solutions to the crisis in Indian agriculture, a product of decades of neglect and poor policies It is quite macabre, really — the barely concealed glee that seems to course through liberal analysts and intellectuals whenever it looks like Prime Minister Narendra Modi is heading for trouble. Macabre, because as the latest series of protests and events centred around farmers show, it is as ghoulish as...

-The Telegraph The Narendra Modi government's record in tacitly supporting the actions of a bunch of vigilante thugs who have been terrorizing the country, especially the Muslims and the Dalits, in the guise of gau rakshaks, or opponents of love jihad, or 'nationalists', has been so outrageous that it has grabbed all the critical attention. In the process, the government's abysmal failures in other spheres have gone virtually unnoticed. One such...

-Livemint.com Crop insurance has failed to provide much-needed relief to farmers from destitution With one farmer committing suicide every half-an-hour, the number of farmers who have ended their lives as per official records in India is estimated at over 300,000 over the past two decades. These numbers do not include suicides by agricultural labourers, though they too are victims of the agrarian crisis. As each death affects at least the immediate family...