-The Hindu Business Line From a severely critical stand against Aadhaar in 2014, the Modi-led BJP in power has made a sharp U-turn to bulldoze its way into having every Indian scanned, tagged and labelled. A timeline of the country’s chequered date with the unique identification project You’ve probably read the WhatsApp joke about a post-Aadhaar scenario in 2020 India. A man orders pizza over phone. He is asked for his Aadhaar...

-RuralIndiaOnline.org Despite the slow decline of the renowned handlooms of Dharmavaram in Andhra Pradesh, Shankara Dhanunjaya tried to work hard and prosper. But in 2016, at the age of 35, debts, crumbling dreams and crushing policy changes drove him to suicide All the handloom halls Into mortuary rooms Being metamorphosed That inexplicable sorrow! (From ‘Maggam bathuku’ an epic poem by Dr. U. Radheya, who is from a family of weavers; translated by Dr. P. Ramesh Narayana) In...

-The Indian Express A new 125-day rice variety promises to provide some respite to Punjab farmers, depleting aquifers Ludhiana: A new variety maturing within 125 days, yet yielding nearly as much as those now grown over 135-160 days, could provide the ultimate solution to Punjab’s woes stemming from farming of water-guzzling paddy. Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) has released a paddy variety PR-126 that gives an average of 30 quintals per acre. This is...

-Business Standard Land acquisition cases take on an average 20 years to navigate the courts Within three years of the framing of the new land law by the Centre, as many as 280 cases have landed in the Supreme Court using the window the law provides to challenge pending acquisitions. Yet land switching from farming to industry need not be a zero sum game as two key studies on land released last...

-TheWire.in In a country where a majority of the population is engaged in increasingly unviable agriculture, shouldn’t politicians talk about the trade rules that make it so?                 One cannot help but draw parallels between the elections in the US and those in the states in India. While it is best left to psephologists to analyse voting patterns and election results, it’s telling to compare the issues on which the elections are...