-BBC Farmers are on the boil again in India. In western Maharashtra state, they have been on strike for a week in some seven districts now, spilling milk on the streets, shutting down markets, protesting on the roads and attacking vegetable trucks. In neighbouring Madhya Pradesh, curfew has been imposed after five farmers were killed in clashes with police on Tuesday. Last month, farmers in southern Telangana and Andhra Pradesh staged protests...

-Livemint.com Maharashtra farmers continue with their protests despite assurance from chief minister Devendra Fadnavis of a debt waiver by October New Delhi: The fifth day of the strike by protesting farmers in Maharashtra on Monday witnessed unprecedented visuals of milk tankers being ferried to state capital Mumbai under heavy police cover. Not long ago, before the monsoons arrived last year, rail wagons transporting water to severely drought-hit districts in the state were...

-Economic and Political Weekly Ajay Dandekar (ajay.dandekar@snu.edu.in) is a professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar University. Sreedeep Bhattacharya (sb514@snu.edu.in) is a fellow at the Centre of Public Affairs and Critical Theory, Shiv Nadar University. A study in two districts recording high numbers of farmer suicide—Yavatmal in Maharashtra and Sangrur in Punjab—explores the tipping point for this desperate act and finds that in addition to the shame of...

-Livemint.com The RBI-commissioned study listed faulty crop choices and aspirational consumption patterns as other major factors for farmer suicides New Delhi: Shame arising out of inability to repay loans taken from relatives and acquaintances is a key reason for farmers resorting to suicide, a study commissioned by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) found. The study titled “Lives in debt: narratives of agrarian distress and farmer suicides”, conducted by researchers at Shiv Nadar...

-Firstpost.com Dr Mano Ranjan has been working at the Institute of Infectious Diseases situated on the Anantapur-Kadiri Road in Andhra Pradesh since 2009. This is the premier institute for the entire Rayalaseema region (southern Andhra Pradesh) for those suffering from HIV/AIDS. Dr Ranjan gets 25 new HIV/AIDS patients every day. "It is a ticking time bomb," he says. Thirty percent of the cases are from hamlets in and around Kadiri, unarguably the...