-Down to Earth Without empowering women in farming by recognising them as farmers and giving them land rights, agriculture can’t be sustained and so can’t the economy In Maharashtra’s 2019 Assembly elections, the Vidarbha constituencies presented interesting trends. The region is important politically not just for the stalwarts who contest from there, but also for the development issues it represents. More than three lakh farmers have committed suicide in India between 1991 and...

-The Hindu The AAP will hope that the Assembly polls are a referendum on its government’s work Delhi, the Union Territory (UT) that hosts India’s capital city, might lag behind several States in total population and in area, but it enjoys outsize significance in terms of media and political attention. With 1.47 crore electors spread across the largely metropolitan national capital region and its pockets of rural voters in some suburbs, Delhi...

-The Hindu Delays in local body polls can be avoided with sterner fixing of accountability It’s been more than two decades since the 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments were passed by Parliament, which accorded constitutional status to local administration bodies across India. Yet, the Tamil Nadu government delayed holding rural local body elections, due in 2016, by three years. This unconstitutional delay started when the Madras High Court cancelled the notification put...

-The Indian Express In the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections, Shah had raised the pitch in West Bengal, where the BJP sought to use the “illegal immigrant” issue as a major poll plank to consolidate the Hindu votes against the Mamata Banerjee-led TMC government in the state. While Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Sunday that there has been no discussion on a National Register of Citizens (NRC) since the time...

-Hindustan Times Jharkhand is a mandate of the poor, for their rights The verdict for the Jharkhand assembly is, first and foremost, a verdict in favour of a new localism, and is a reflection of people’s voice overwhelming the arena of State Elections in India. One key issue, which helps frame the meaning of the verdict, is the struggle of adivasis against purported amendments to their land rights by the Raghubar Das-led Bharatiya...