-The Economic Times The world is no stranger to farm debt crises like the one India is seeing today. Back in the 1980s, the Canadian parliament enacted a law to stop foreclosures on farm debt, after prices collapsed and interest rates jumped to as high as 24%. The law was in force for a dozen-odd years. It identified insolvent farmers, facilitated agreements between the borrowers and lenders, and helped some farmers move...

-Livemint.com Thanks to the debt relief commission, 11,354 Kerala farmers have benefited from a disbursement of over ?11 crore, and there are no farmer suicides in the state Ernakulam/ Bengaluru: Back in 2006, Kerala came face to face with an explosive situation. Ironically in a state dominated by Communist politicians, farming was dominated by export-oriented cash crops such as rubber and pepper, prices of which had plunged in the global market. It...

-The Indian Express The Bill provides for “surveillance, inspection, operation and maintenance of specified dams for prevention of dam failure related disasters and to provide for institutional mechanism to ensure their safe functioning”. New Delhi: WHEN THE government introduced the Dam Safety Bill, 2018 in Lok Sabha last week, BJD floor leader Bhartruhari Mahtab questioned Parliament’s competence to do so. Days later, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K Palaniswami wrote to the...

-The Hindu Election jolt makes party look at ways to boost rural income; BJP chief commissions survey The defeat in the Assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh has made the government go back to the drawing board over the issue of rural distress, and some measures to bolster incomes in the countryside may be announced by the end of the winter session of Parliament. While the problems plaguing the agriculture sector...

-Huffingtonpost.in Secrecy in amending the RTI Act as well as in the appointment of Information Commissioners in the CIC reveal the government's intention to destroy the spirit of the transparency law. With over 6 million information applications filed every year, the Indian Right to Information (RTI) Act is the most extensively used transparency legislation globally. The law has empowered ordinary citizens to hold the government accountable. It has been used for a...