-Frontline A noteworthy study that provides much-needed insights into the nature and severity of the farm crisis in Punjab. There have been many studies on agrarian distress and farmer suicides in different parts of India in the last decade, including in Punjab. Most of the studies focus on a profile of the victims, mostly landowning farmers, and reasons thereof, with a sample of such farmers. In this context, this book makes a...

-Livemint.com Increasing women’s ownership of land in rural areas can help cut poverty and boost agricultural output in a country like India where dependence on agriculture is high New Delhi: Increasing women’s ownership of land in rural areas can help cut poverty and boost agricultural output in a country like India where dependence on agriculture is high. Women constitute 30.3% of the total number of cultivators and 42.6% of the agricultural labourers...

-The Hindu As of July 2016, 33,091 NGOs were registered under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act, which regulates foreign funding to these bodies. A total of 3,068 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) received foreign funding above Rs. 22,000 crore in 2014-15, according to government data presented in response to a question in Parliament. These are NGOs who reported receiving more than Rs. 1 crore from foreign donors. This amount was 83.3 per cent (nearly double)...

-IndiaSpend.com As floods ravage eastern and northern India, agriculture in 115 districts across 15 states is “highly vulnerable” to climate change, according to a May 2016 study, published in Indian Academy of Science’s journal Current Science. The first to analyse 38 meteorological, agricultural and social data across all of India’s 572 rural districts, the study creates a climate vulnerability index for agriculture, divided into five categories of vulnerability: Very high, high, moderate,...

-The Hindu We need to rethink social safety nets in India’s growing economy so that they can also focus on the accidents of life rather than solely on the accidents of birth. Sometimes the grand narratives of the Left and the Right do not seem to have any relationship with the lived experiences of ordinary Indians. For the past two decades, the Left has tried to expand social welfare programmes for the...