-IANS Farmer suicides have been taking place across India for years now, and studies of rural distress reveal the deeply-rooted, tenacious causes, such as lack of irrigation, fragmentation of land, unsuitability of seeds and inadequate sources of credit. Despite the Democratically-elected governments that claim to represent a country where over half the population is dependent on farming, agriculture has been consistently ignored at a steep cost to farmers' lives. Remedies have been...

-Livemint.com The govt will count jobs created in establishments deploying less than 10 people, which essentially means that shops run by one owner and one employee too will be counted as employment generation New Delhi: Expanding the scope of job creation in the country, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government has now decided to start counting jobs created in the non-farm informal sector. The government has asked labour bureau under the Union labour...

-The Times of India Backed by chief minister Yogi Adityanath, the Uttar Pradesh police has launched a vigorous crackdown on criminals. Some criminals have been killed in encounters and many, out of fear of being gunned down, have surrendered. According to data sourced from police headquarters as many as 1,142 encounters were recorded between March 2017 and January this year, and 38 alleged criminals were killed. Encounter specialists in the police are...

-TheWire.in Environmentalist and water management expert Ravi Chopra says river inter-linking will sow the seeds for future conflicts between states. There is nothing new about the proposed river-interlinking project being pushed by the government, and this ‘unnecessary excess’ of a project will create more problems than it promises to solve, says environmentalist and water management expert, Dr Ravi Chopra, the director of People’s Science Institute, Dehradun and a managing trustee of the...

-Livemint.com To stabilize crop prices and make them remunerative, the Swaminathan Commission proposed significant improvements in the implementation of MSPs Across the country, farmers are furious—and rightfully so. Four years ago, they helped bring the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power, believing Narendra Modi’s claims that they would no longer suffer official neglect. But since then, conditions in agriculture have got worse. Earlier problems have worsened as farm incomes have been squeezed...