-The Hindu Farmers’ protests interrogate the reigning development model.   Alternatives do exist The recent spate of peasant protests across wide swathes of the country points sharply to the unjust folly and sheer unviability of the path of development that India has embraced, especially in the reform era since the late 1980s. Even, say, a modest food critic in metropolitan India collects an immodest annual pay package which can easily go into seven figures....

-The Hindu Amid criticism from SC/ST panel, experts say project must continue Now in her late twenties, Veeramma Selvan of Thekkekadampara tribal hamlet in Sholayur gram panchayat of Attappady has reasons to believe that her gods have stopped smiling. It was in January last year that she lost her five-month-old, underweight son Balu — her fourth child — allegedly due to milk aspiration. (a medical condition in which the mother's milk goes...

-The Indian Express Of 700-odd districts, merely 194 have the recommended exclusive courts for SC/ST Act cases. The Sunday Express travels to two such courts — one in Ahmedabad, set up after Una, and the other in Banda, a district with a high number of cases — to find a familiar story Over 1.44 lakh cases of atrocities against Scheduled Castes and 23,408 cases of atrocities against Scheduled Tribes came for trial...

-The Times of India Thiruvananthapuram: The efforts of district NREGA cell to recreate assets to deal with possible drought situation have produced good results in some of the rural panchayats in the district.   Construction of farm ponds which was extensively carried out under employment guarantee scheme has gifted the district with over 2,000 farm ponds in areas where agriculture is the predominant occupation. The move also triggered a shift from the usual...

-The Indian Express The last two years have seen some progress in expediting completion of unfinished major and minor canal projects. Pune: Sustained efforts over the last two years to improve irrigation access for farmers in India seem to have begun showing results, at least in terms of creation of physical infrastructure. The Narendra Modi government had, in 2016, embarked on a mission to complete all unfinished major and medium irrigation projects – some...