-TheWire.in According to NCRB data for 2014, the suicide rate for ‘housewives’ was more than double that of farmers, though the latter gets far more media attention. What does this really indicate? In 2014, National Crime Records Bureau data showed that 20,148 housewives took then own lives across the country. This amounts to approximately 18% of all suicides that year. A recent article in the Economic and Political Weekly by political scientist Peter...

-The Times of India It would be fair to the impoverished tribals of Attapadi if both chief minister Oommen Chandy and CM-in-waiting Pinarayi Vijayan get their acts right before politicizing the tribal issue and blaming Prime Minster Narendra Modi for 'insulting the people of Kerala.' A detailed study done by research scholars of Chittur College, Palakkad - analyzing the livelihood status of tribes in Attapadi block revealed that the Human Development...

-The Indian Express Why the revival of exports matters as much as rains for Indian farmers. It is generally held that the woes of Indian farmers today have had largely to do with extreme weather events. The southwest monsoon failed in both 2014 and 2015. Besides, we had extensive crop damage from unseasonal rain and hailstorms over large parts of north, west and central India in March 2015. From this also follows the...

-The Indian Express The suffering of millions does not create public outrage, much less government accountability. The people of India’s villages carry collective memories of centuries of calamitous losses of sometimes millions of lives in famines. Famines have been pushed into history, unarguably one of free India’s greatest accomplishments. But the same can’t be said about droughts, which continue to extract an enormous toll on human suffering. At least a third of the...

-Livemint.com Pulses use less water per unit crop and also address hidden hunger The severe drought across India should hopefully help focus attention on the overuse of water in agriculture. A data analysis by Roshan Kishore in this newspaper last week showed that the average water footprint for five major crops—rice, wheat, maize, sugarcane and cotton—is far higher than global averages. At the root of the problem is a policy framework that...