-Hindkisan.com “This amendment is an insult to people who fought hard to secure progressive provisions in the LARR 2013, it weaken people’s power to challenge illegal and unjust forced acquisition of land, and empowers the state and corporations to infringe upon people’s rights over natural resources” read the statement. Various civil society organisations have come together to oppose the recent President’s assent granted to the amendments made in the Andhra Pradesh Land...

-Business Standard/ India Spend Delays in wage payment have been a constant throughout MGNREGS implementation Bachcha Lal’s shirt hung loosely over his frail body, exposing his sunken collarbones, as he stood outside his straw-thatched home in central Uttar Pradesh’s (UP) Bundelkhand region. “They all rely on me,” he said, pointing towards his tubercular son, daughter-in-law and grand-daughter. Illiterate and a landless labourer, 65-year-old Lal makes about Rs 175 a day when he...

-The Indian Express The NDA government’s approach towards MGNREGA — the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act — has differed from that of the previous UPA regime in one significant way: There is greater emphasis now in the building of “individual household” assets, as opposed to “community” assets, under the scheme that provides 100 days of guaranteed wage employment annually to every rural household whose adult members volunteer to do...

-ThePrint.in It is nobody’s case that problems of agriculture can be fixed by soil health cards, loan waivers, crop insurance or e-NAM. The five-day long march of 30,000 farmers from Nashik to Mumbai has touched a chord with urban India. Even though some said they were implementing the agenda of ‘urban Naxalites’, the pictures of poor tribals and farmers, men and women, old and young, walking in heat, many without shoes, will...

-The Indian Express Large numbers of the tribals who have gathered in the Mumbai are not seeking a loan waiver, but the implementation of the vision envisaged in Forest Rights Act, a legislation enacted by Parliament in 2006. The nearly 40,000 sunburnt and dusty men and women waiting patiently in an open ground in Mumbai on Sunday night tell the story of the continuing gloom in Maharashtra’s farmlands more succinctly than the...