-The New Indian Express Something remarkable happened when the farmers came marching to Mumbai recently. Instead of greeting them with hostility, Mumbaikars welcomed them with affection, food and water. This change in attitude was triggered by the farmers’ extraordinary discipline and their efforts to ensure minimal disruption to the Mumbaikars’ routines. Even hard-boiled journalists acknowledged, for a brief moment, urbanites had realised  our farmers and adivasis were indeed facing difficult times. The...

  The total number of farm suicides in the country has reduced from 12,602 to 11,370 between 2015 and 2016 viz. a fall by 9.8 percent. This has been revealed recently in a reply by the Minister of State in the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Shri Parshottam Rupala in the Lok Sabha. So, one may wonder why there is such a hue and cry about rural distress and agrarian crisis...

-Groundxero.in India’s forests are officially on sale. Forests, which are ecological and cultural constructs intrinsically linked with human communities that have been living in and using those for ages, have turned into mere repositories of ‘products’ such as timber and ‘ecosystem services’ that could be quantified, valued, priced and exchanged—or so the Draft National Forest Policy prepared by the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change(MoEF & CC) would have us...

-TheWire.in The focus of the Maharashtra farmers' march was on land rights for Adivasi communities. That promise will take a while to fulfil, and not much headway has been made. It has been a month since over 40,000 farmers walked 180 km from Nashik to Mumbai to press for their demands. They returned home with an assurance from the state’s chief minister that their demands would be met “100%”. Although chief...

-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...