-India Today While politicians are busy earning brownie points through waving off farmer loans, the farmers in Maharashtra's Pune and Ahmednagar districts have a different story to tell. I had decided to check whether the farmers in Maharashtra are really in favour of the loan waiver after the opposition members were screaming in the legislature almost every day, during the budget session which began on March 9 and concluded on April 17....

-Scroll.in Instead of wages for a short period of time, the family running the project in Lanka village will create an asset for life. Mahavir Parhaiya’s household in the remote village of Lanka in Latehar district of Jharkhand is bustling with activity. They are busy working on setting up a mango plantation on what was once a barren plot near their house, under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act...

-The Hindu State government preparing its response to the model groundwater bill circulated by Central government The State government does not favour the idea of pricing groundwater for agriculture. The government, which is fine-tuning its response to the model groundwater bill circulated by the Central government, feels that the text of the model bill provides scope for the idea, which, if translated into action, will only attract controversies, says a senior official. Though...

-The Indian Express We have been numbed by a series of lies, myths and fictions about the project. India is at risk of becoming a surveillance state, with faint resistance from libertarians, intellectuals, political parties, the media, or the Supreme Court. Very soon, almost everyone will have an Aadhaar number, seeded in hundreds of databases. Most of these databases will be accessible to the government without invoking any special powers. Permanent surveillance...

-The Indian Express The Indian Express travels down the meat value chain in Uttar Pradesh to find a seamless system that’s now under strain. FOR Puran Chand Sharma, dealing with Mohammad Sabir Qureshi is a twice or maybe thrice-a-year affair. But this transactional relationship is essential to sustaining his dairy farm operation involving 10 female buffaloes — three now in-milk, two pregnant animals, two young yet-to-calve heifers, and three one-year-old calves. “The ones...