-The Economic Times Vidarbha has over 20% of the state’s population and is the land of perennial agrarian crisis and farmers’ suicides. Ten Lok Sabha seats are up for grabs in Vidarbha. In 2014, the BJP-Shiv Sena combine delivered a body blow to this Congress base (with NCP fighting separately then) by sweeping all the 10 seats. The BJP won 44 of the 62 assembly segments of the region without an alliance...

-The Times of India Following the Supreme Court order to clear forest land in possession of people whose title claims were rejected under the Forest (Rights) Act, 2006, the Maharashtra government has asked forest officials to free such land from the possession of illegal occupants. On February 22, the state government issued orders seeking to know how many claims under community forest rights (CFRs) and individual forest rights (IFRs) under FRA were...

-Livemint.com Thanks to the debt relief commission, 11,354 Kerala farmers have benefited from a disbursement of over ?11 crore, and there are no farmer suicides in the state Ernakulam/ Bengaluru: Back in 2006, Kerala came face to face with an explosive situation. Ironically in a state dominated by Communist politicians, farming was dominated by export-oriented cash crops such as rubber and pepper, prices of which had plunged in the global market. It...

-The Hindu Urge parties to frame policies to preserve MUNDRI: For southern Rajasthan’s tribals, the Assembly elections are an opportunity to press their demand with the contesting political parties for framing policies that ensure food security, even while helping them preserve indigenous practices, and assist in forming new linkages with the local health and financial services. The region’s tribal population wants political representatives to make interventions to help the community improve resource management...

-The Telegraph Former RBI governor chats about economy, RBI-Centre standoff and his latest book Even 15 years after quitting the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), former governor Bimal Jalan lapses into RBI-speak whenever he doesn’t want to say much on an issue. We are in Jalan’s office on the sixth floor of an apartment block, a few hundred metres from the Delhi headquarters of the RBI. At the very outset, he tells me...