A report by the Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) reveals that there is a strong link between farmers’ suicides and denial of social and gender justice. It says that farmers’ suicides, which are a grim marker of India’s agrarian crisis, will become more severe in times to come due to the existing gender and caste-based discrimination. Issued by CHRGJ and the International Human Rights Clinic (at New York...

Land acquisition and involuntary displacement have been the fountainhead of enormous destitution of millions of invisible people since Independence. Generations of those sacrificed for ‘development’ are farmers and farm workers, and many are fragile tribal people and forest gatherers. By coercive displacement and dispossession, governments pauperise its poorest people, and its food-growers, so that the ‘nation’ can prosper and grow. Rage at persisting State injustice of coercive displacement frequently spills onto...

India’s fiscal policy is not supportive of monetary measures that the country’s central bank is employing to fight rampant inflation, the prime minister’s honorary economic advisor and former International Monetary Fund chief economist Raghuram Rajan said, while singling out the proposed Food Security Bill as a particular cause for concern. The Bill, which proposes to give about 68 per cent of population the legal right to subsidised food, will not only...

There is nothing wrong in having advisory groups. But there is a problem when groups not constituted legally cross the line of demands, advice and rights-based, democratic agitation. The 1990s saw marketing whiz kids at the largest English daily in the world steal a term then in vogue among sexually discriminated minorities: PLUs — or People Like Us. Media content would henceforth be for People Like Us. This served advertisers' needs...

When Sushil Kumar heard that the government was about to offer drought-hit farmers compensation in the form of monetary relief, his hopes rose. Production may have been poor, but all was not lost. With the compensation amount he would get, Kumar thought he would buy better seeds to sow for the next cropping season. And if there was still any extra left, he may even consider buying a thresher. That...