-The Economic Times With a weak monsoon, farmers and farm labour, agri-investors and policy makers, everyone is looking up in the sky and praying for more water to pour. Farm analysts are debating whether this will lead to a drop of 16 million tonnes of foodgrain, as it happened in 2009, or 38 million tonnes, as it did in 2002. NCAER is projecting 20 million tonnes drop in grain production in...

-AFP GUWAHATI - About 25,000 villagers have fled their homes in northeast India during clashes between Bodo tribal groups and Muslim settlers in which 15 people have been killed, police said Monday.  Soldiers were also out in force in the restive state of Assam in an effort to quell further violence that has led to many villagers moving to nearby government shelters to avoid the fighting over land rights.  "Clashes that broke out...

-Press Information Bureau I am very happy to release the Mahatma Gandhi NREGA Sameeksha, brought out by the Ministry of Rural Development. This is an innovative way of looking at our development programmes. I compliment Shri Jairam Ramesh for taking the initiative to reach out to scholars in different parts of our country to apply their minds to analysis of what is being achieved, what is possible, what is not yet...

-Kafila.org Almost a century ago, Katherine Mayo published a book titled ‘Mother India’ that criticized the Indian way of living, and Rudyard Kipling  spoke of the ‘White Man’s Burden’. These writings reflected the colonial perspective that what colonizers did was in the best interest of the colonized people. Consequently, most well-meaning citizens of colonial powers were alienated from the horrible plight of the colonized. Purpose well served – unopposed exploitation. Years later,...

-The Telegraph Union food minister K.V. Thomas today claimed the Bengal government had distributed only a small fraction of foodgrain specially allotted last year for 10 backward districts, drawing a sharp rebuttal from the state, as another confrontation with the Centre unfolded over figures. Thomas’s comment came days after Union home minister P. Chidambaram had voiced concern over Bengal’s “culture of violence” and cited casualty figures that were contested by the Mamata...