-The New Indian Express She said she started facing the social boycott from the time she had lodged a complaint alleging corruption in MGNREGA implementation. GUWAHATI: A woman in Meghalaya alleged she was facing a social boycott in her village for “exposing” corruption in the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). Thrina Suchen, who hails from East Jaintia Hills, alleged that the village authorities had on November 30...

-CaravanMagazine.in In 2006, the Bihar government deregulated the agricultural sector, and largely removed government oversight over food grain procurement. Previously a majority of food grain procurement happened through the Agricultural Produce Market Committee, a marketing board run by the state government that would organise mandis—wholesale markets—where farmers could directly sell their produce to the Food Corporation of India or the State Farming Corporation at the established minimum support price. The MSP...

-The Tribune Instead of leaving the farmers to face the vagaries of markets, which have pushed them globally into a debt trap, the demand for ensuring that no trading takes place below the MSP not only provides farmers with a safety net but it will also gradually become an economic design for the rest of the world to emulate. Across the globe, farmers are suffering the consequences of keeping farm-gate prices...

-The Indian Express Legal action against Scihub and Libgen frames problem of control and governance of knowledge in a globalised world. The recent litigations against Scihub and Libgen by Elsevier, Wiley and ACS bring us to a moment of many realisations about control and governance of knowledge in academia. In the latter half of the 20th century, globalisation led to the imperative of applying “global” standards to higher education. As global standards...

-Scroll.in The author of the forthcoming ‘The Great Gender Divergence’ on how agriculture can explain why some parts of India are more gender-equal than others. Dr Alice Evans is a lecturer at King’s College London and a faculty associate at Harvard’s Centre for International Development. Taking inspiration from research on the great divergence – the idea that Western Europe saw tremendous socioeconomic shifts in the 19th century that led to industrial growth...