-The Hindu Business Line Girl child seen as a burden in the region that reels under drought Thirty-eight-year-old Meera Ekhande from Beed district in Marathwada region of Maharashtra had given birth to seven girls and aborted two, but her family kept insisting on having a son. In her tenth pregnancy, Meera was delivered of a stillborn boy and she died because of excessive bleeding. But this is not an isolated case in...

-The Hindu In addition to reforming the credit system, agriculture should be made profitable Rural agrarian distress is firmly at the centre of the national discourse today, triggered by the recent Assembly election results in the Hindi heartland as well as continuous farmer agitations in the past two years (picture). Just a month ago, the farmers’ march in Delhi highlighted the reality of their deprivation, anger and resolve. Quite remarkably, their presence...

-Livemint.com Reeling under intense dry spell, state recorded 49% rain?deficit, says regional?disaster monitoring centre Bengaluru: The Karnataka government on Wednesday declared 156 out of the 176 talukas of the state drought hit in the wake of a failed northeast monsoon. This has added to the growing call for the speedy implementation of the farm loan waiver to mitigate the deepening agrarian distress. The declaration comes months after several districts of the state...

-Livemint.com Thanks to the debt relief commission, 11,354 Kerala farmers have benefited from a disbursement of over ?11 crore, and there are no farmer suicides in the state Ernakulam/ Bengaluru: Back in 2006, Kerala came face to face with an explosive situation. Ironically in a state dominated by Communist politicians, farming was dominated by export-oriented cash crops such as rubber and pepper, prices of which had plunged in the global market. It...

-The Indian Express The new year could witness the first national elections being fought on farmers’ issues. And it could test both the ruling BJP pushed to the defensive, particularly in the larger sugar-producing states, and the Congress under pressure to deliver loan waivers If 2017 saw the beginnings of agrarian unrest in large swathes of the country, 2018 brought it centrestage as the numero uno political issue. And almost everyone’s...