-The New Indian Express TIRUCHY: Cliched it may sound, but it indeed was a Black Friday for farm workers as the Supreme Court order reducing Tamil Nadu’s share of Cauvery will have a cascading effect and effectively shrink cultivation area. Already rendered jobless by the drought, reduction in the cultivation area will only add to their woes. Marginal farmers and farm workers in tail-end delta regions, are worried that the SC verdict...

-The Hindu The children of the farmers who committed suicide do not receive the support or counselling they need to recover from the resulting mental trauma. Jyoti Shelar visits the villages in Maharashtra worst affected by farmer suicide and reports on these minors’ struggle to get their lives back on track “Every time I open the door, I see my father’s body,” says 14-year-old Nikita Surwase, pointing at the iron shaft on...

-The New Indian Express HYDERABAD: A recently published study on the causes of 1,325 suicide cases reported at the 1,000-bed Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Hospital in Warangal over a span of six years (2010-15) raises many questions as 519 cases (58.3 per cent of total) were due to consumption of pesticide and another 174 cases (17.4 per cent), were due to consumption of herbicides and fungicides. The study titled “Trends and determinants of...

-The Hindu Inducting Licentiate Medical Practitioners may be the solution to the chronic shortage of doctors in rural areas Nearly 600 million people in India, mostly in the rural areas, have little or no access to health care. A widespread disregard for norms, a perpetual failure to reach targets, and an air of utter helplessness are what mark the state of rural health care today. One can add to this another...

  The declining trend in organized sector employment (i.e. in establishments employing 10 or more workers) continued in the first quarter of 2017-18. The sixth round of the Quarterly Report on Employment Scenario in selected sectors (as on 1st July, 2017), which was released in February this year, confirms this. The Labour Bureau’s latest report says that the net number of jobs created in the 8 major sectors of the economy was...