-The Indian Express In the recent exercise, state governments, tasked with verifying 54,929 manual scavengers identified across 170 select districts in stage one of the counting process, have confirmed involvement of only 25,015 people in the job in the final verification stage. New Delhi: State governments have denied the existence of more than half the number of people identified as being involved in manual scavenging in the course of a Central...

-Livemint.com The farm loan waiver terms make little sense in Punjab where average landholding is over three times the national average Patiala/ New Delhi: All that Jagdeep Singh wants is a few hours of peaceful sleep. The 24-year-old from Sangatpura village in Punjab’s Patiala district had no clue that the morning of 11 December would change his life forever. At six in the morning that day, he woke up to the sudden...

Just a few days ahead of the Kisan Mukti March in Delhi NCR, the provisional results of the Agriculture Census 2015-16 became available in the public domain. The report, among other things, highlights the long-term problems affecting Indian agriculture including fragmentation of land holdings (particularly the marginal and small ones) and shrinking average size of farm land. The provisional results of the latest Agriculture Census reveal that at the national level...

-The Indian Express In the absence of patience and vision, the loan waiver remains the most favoured response to farm distress Thousands of farmers from different parts of India marched to Delhi on November 29-30 to register their protest against the Narendra Modi government’s perceived apathy and neglect of farmers’ demands. They were basically demanding three things: One, debate in Parliament to discuss farm distress; two, one-time loan waiver; and three,...

-The Hindu Braving Maoist call for boycott, villagers exercise franchise Karimnagar (Tenlangana): In spite of heightened naxalite threat, villagers, mostly dominated by tribal communities, have set an example in Telangana by recording over 90% polling in the Maoist stronghold villages in the interior Mahadevpur, Kataram and Mahamutharam mandals adjoining the Chhattisgarh in the erstwhile Karimnagar district, now in Jayashankar-Bhupalapalli district. Braving the Maoist call for poll boycott, people formed serpentine queues to exercise...