-The Hindustan Times The Narendra Modi government has ‘prima facie' discriminated against the 500-member Sikh community in Kutch, a report by the National Commission for Minorities says. The government had ordered the Sikhs to sell their land and return to Punjab because they were not Gujaratis, citing the Bombay Tenancy and Agricultural Lands Act, 1948. The commission strongly disapproved of the interpretation that only Gujarati farmers could own or buy land in the...

-The Hindu The National Sample Survey Organisation's newest set of consumption expenditure data for 2011-12 gives an insight into how those across the spectrum, from the poorest to the richest, live in different parts of India. For one it's clear that we are not talking about a rich country. An individual who spends over Rs. 2,886 per month in a rural area or Rs. 6,383 per month in an urban area is...

-The Indian Express The Gujarat model of development is not what its champions say it is Having realised that the people of India have not exonerated him for the post-Godhra killings of Muslims in 2002 on his watch, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi systematically tried to build up his image as a "man of development"(vikas purush). The Sangh Parivar called it the "Gujarat model of development" and started propagating it. But what...

-The Hindu Groundwater meets three quarters of the State's farming needs The Punjab State Farmers Commission recently published a draft new agriculture policy for the State that envisages substantial crop diversification from paddy and wheat staples that the State has been growing since the sixties. The draft policy, currently being debated in agriculture circles, is the first serious road map to steer Punjab's agriculture towards a new dynamic, necessitated by a sharp...

-The Telegraph Kolkata: Seedbeds are not yet ready in vast stretches of Bengal's rice bowl because of poor rainfall, raising the prospect of a slump in production and showing up the inability of catchy slogans alone in making farming less of a gamble in the monsoon. Rainfall in the four major rice-producing districts of Bengal till Monday was around 50 per cent less than the normal average, officials in the agriculture department...