-The Indian Express While mills are required, by law, to pay the SAP amount within 14 days of cane purchase, the Malakpur factory has till date disbursed a mere Rs 32 crore. That amounts to less than 7 per cent of what is due to its 34,000-odd farmers. Baghpat (U.P.): On the road to the sugar mill in Malakpur, the number of flies first multiply, then quadruply. It’s late May and the...

-The Telegraph Kairana: Ganna, the sugarcane crop, is threatening to overshadow any talk of "Jinnah" and sour the BJP's chances in Monday's test against a combined Opposition in a corner of western Uttar Pradesh. After the shock setbacks in Gorakhpur and Phulpur in March, the Kairana Lok Sabha by-election has become crucial for the BJP. It's also critical for its rivals, offering a test, days after the Karnataka drama, of whether a united...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The concern over the silence of the Prime Minister on the dilution of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act has spread beyond Dalit MPs in the NDA. Junior human resource development minister and BJP ally Upendra Kushwaha on Tuesday wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi that the government should immediately move the Supreme Court against the order that prevents immediate arrest over complaints of...

-The Asian Age It’s a huge story. And it’s not getting the kind of media attention it deserves. It’s a story about India’s farmers. It’s a story about the ongoing agrarian crisis in the country in the wake of two successive years of drought. If one looks only at the figures of growth of gross domestic product which tend to make headlines in financial publications, there’s no story for agriculture comprises...

-Hindustan Times Bettiah/Bagaha: Bihar’s Mandate 2015 has been billed as a choice between good governance and a return to ‘jungle raj’ (rule of the wild). But what matters most for the marginalised tribes in the state is going back to the days when they enjoyed their jungle rights. The 899 sq km Valmiki National Park along the Nepal border in West Champaran district is Bihar’s only tiger reserve. The fringes of this...