-Frontline.in The government ought to have specified its definition of cost of crop production in the Budget to prevent any confusion in the minds of people on minimum support prices. Speaking at the Krishi Unnati Mela 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi reportedly complained that confusion was being spread about the announcement on minimum support prices (MSPs) made in the Finance Minister’s 2018 Budget speech. The speech had assured farmers that they would,...

-The Hindu The withdrawal of ill-conceived restrictions on livestock trade is welcome Good sense appears to have prevailed at last. With a fresh set of draft rules to replace last year’s poorly conceived ones, the Centre has sought to withdraw the ban on sale of cattle for slaughter in animal markets. The draft rules are now open for comments and suggestions. When the Union Ministry for Environment, Forests and Climate Change notified...

-NDTV (with inputs from IANS)   RTI responses on EVMs have highlighted irregularities in everything from the number of voting machines the Election Commission bought to the price it paid for them. New Delhi: Responses to a series of Right to Information requests have THRown up multiple red flags in the Election Commission's acquisition and use of EVMs or Electronic Voting Machines. From huge inconsistencies in the records of the machines acquired...

-The Hindu Farmers’ protests interrogate the reigning development model.   Alternatives do exist The recent spate of peasant protests across wide swathes of the country points sharply to the unjust folly and sheer unviability of the path of development that India has embraced, especially in the reform era since the late 1980s. Even, say, a modest food critic in metropolitan India collects an immodest annual pay package which can easily go into seven figures....

-Press Release by NREGA Sangharsh Morcha dated 11 April, 2018 Stagnant wage rates are not the only rude shock that workers of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) received this month. Most of the them also remain unpaid for the work done by them in the past few months. Ninety-nine per cent of the Fund Transfer Orders (FTOs) for MGNREGA wage payments sent to the Public Finance Management...