-TheWire.in As much at risk as the farmers if the laws are not repealed, the Dalits are also determined not to be used by the BJP to turn the protests against the new agriculture laws into an issue of landowners’ rights. New Delhi: On January 7, Thursday, when 2,000 labourers of the Punjab Khet Mazdoor Union (PKMU) began their journey from Dabwali, Punjab, to the Tikri border between Haryana and Delhi to...

-Scroll.in Influenced by conservative vegetarian lobbies, most BJP-ruled states do not serve nutrition-laden eggs in school and Anganwadi menus. In her haunting short story Shishu (Little Ones), writer Mahashweta Devi depicts the cruelty of shrunk bodies deformed by acute hunger and starvation in Adivasi hamlets, due to chronic administrative apathy. Reminiscent of this dystopian parable, the recently released National Family Health Survey 2019-’20, for the first time since the turn of the millennium...

-The Indian Express The Centre is within its rights to enact laws promoting barrier-free trade of farm produce (inter- as well as intra-state) and also dismantling stockholding restrictions. But that can be only after the farmer has sold. In November 2019, the Fifteenth Finance Commission submitted its interim report, wherein it proposed special “performance based incentives” to states that carried out agriculture sector reforms. These reforms specifically pertained to their enacting and implementing...

-TheWire.in The finance ministry had said, "Market fee is not a tax and the concerned APMC provides facilities in mandis in exchange for the amount." New Delhi: Amid the raging protests against the disputed agrarian laws passed by the Centre, a far more widespread and deeper controversy has emerged over the taxes levied across state agricultural markets. Members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have been criticising the Agricultural Produce Market Committee tax...

-Outlook India A schoolteacher shot right through the eye, businessmen brothers disappeared, a jewellery shop looted of crores, even politicians murdered…Nitish is fast losing his USP. Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar may have earned compliments for his administration’s zero-tolerance policy towards crime in his previous three terms—closing the insulting Jungle Raj repeat-phrase that defined the state before his rule. But his latest tenure has thrown up a big challenge on the law...