-Economic and Political Weekly   The emphasis on use of digital technologies to bridge the "rural-urban gap" in the union budget is limited to high talk and minimal allocations. The need for a more comprehensive and peoples' participation-oriented rural action plan should have been the focus while setting sectoral allocations, but that is not to be in this mid-year budget. Vipul Mudgal (vipulmudgal@gmail.com) heads the Inclusive Media for Change project at the Centre...

-The Indian Express A headlong rush into PPPs will only leave a trail of disputes, renegotiations, corruption. The conventional wisdom in India on public-private partnerships (PPPs) is that they help governments raise capital to meet large infrastructure investment targets. But this rationale for promoting PPPs does not stand on strong foundations. There are three potential reasons for supporting PPPs. First, they enable governments to access more capital without visibly breaching fiscal targets. In...

-The Indian Express For the first time, the interests of farmers, livelihood losers and SC/ST communities have been given high priority. After intensive and extensive consultations lasting for over two years, the UPA 2 government succeeded in getting Parliament to pass a historic new land acquisition law in September 2013. This law completely replaced the colonial Land Acquisition Act, 1894. The new legislation did not fully satisfy everybody but it came to...

-Rediff.com 'Suicide rates among Indian farmers were a chilling 47 per cent higher than they were for the rest of the population in 2011. In some of the states worst hit by the agrarian crisis, they were well over 100 per cent higher. In Maharashtra, farmers were killing themselves at a rate that was 162 per cent higher than that for any other Indians excluding farmers. A farmer in this state...

-PSainath.org At least ten farmers have killed themselves every day, on average, for a straight ten years in the rich state of Maharashtra. Nation-wide the farm suicides total nears the 300,000-mark, as the data of the National Crime Records Bureau show. At least 3,146 farmers committed suicide in Maharashtra in 2013, the latest data of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) show. That brings the total number of farmers taking their own...