-The Hindu Business Line Rising input costs have shrunk Profits, making cultivation unviable. Easy access to credit and better MSPs can help The unremitting wave of farmer suicides has resurfaced, now haunting the farming heartlands of Tamil Nadu. Troubled by a severely deficit monsoon which triggered the worst drought in 140 years, over 100 farmers, mostly in the Cauvery delta, have reportedly committed suicide during a period of one month, and the...

-The Indian Express Protests by the people against inequality are producing governments that move exactly in the opposite direction We all know that the world is an unequal place, both across and within countries. We also know that across the world, people are expressing their anger and disgust at this inequality. This is increasingly revealed in extreme and often paradoxical political results. In the US, a vote against the establishment has just...

-The Indian Express Studying micro economies such as Bastar gives us the tools to highlight the rising inequality between the bourgeoise and proletariat. New Delhi: In Delhi University professor Nandini Sundar’s meticulously researched book, The Burning Forest: India’s War in Bastar, the plight of the adivasis struggling to make ends meet paints a striking picture of the growing wage disparity in the “Maoist state”. Wages paid to the adivasis are strictly controlled...

-The Financial Express In Madhya Pradesh’s tribal districts of Dewas and Khargone, the NGO, Samaj Pragati Sahayog, discourages cash transactions for agricultural inputs. The interest rates are usurious and vary according to commodities. For fertiliser, it is dheda—loan for the stuff has to be repaid 1.5 times over by the end of the harvest season. For pesticides it is sawa, or 1.25 times. Even barter can be extortionate. One quintal of...

-The Hindu Cultivators in Punjab and Haryana head for another period of distress, thanks to demonetisation Demonetisation of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1,000 notes has badly hit potato growers in Punjab and Haryana where farmers are heading for yet another period of distress as they are finding it difficult to recover even the cost of produce, let alone make Profits. In Jalandhar’s vegetable market, the fresh-crop potato fetched as low as Rs. 100...