-The Financial Express Over 14 crore households who cultivate on land owned by others under a formal lease agreement or even under a temporary arrangement overseen by the gram panchayats or other official functionaries may soon start getting assorted sops doled out to “farmers” by the government just as their land-owing counterparts do. According to official sources, the definition of farmer will be changed via a gazzette notification to include cultivators...

-Hindustan Times The Gwalior bench of the high court has suggested that scheduled caste or scheduled tribe be used instead of Dalit. Bhopal: The Madhya Pradesh high court has asked the state government and the Centre not to use the term Dalit in official communication, saying the word finds no mention in the Constitution. In a directive issued on Monday, the Gwalior bench of the high court suggested scheduled caste or scheduled...

-The Economic Times The art of good governance is through trial and error, figuring out what works where and how, and scaling up from below. Only then can one have a solid foundation. Aadhaar literally means something that holds (dhaaran: to hold). The word is interpreted either as a foundation or base (such as, to a building), or a container (such as, of water), even though given that it is an identity-verifying...

-The Economic Times "Open any boll here and you'll see it's destroyed," says Ganesh Shere, a farmer at a village called Jamb in Yavatmal district, about 160 km from Nagpur, in northeast Maharashtra. He walks along the length of his bone-dry, four-acre cotton field and splits two dozen cotton bolls, with a stone or his fingers, to reveal the damage done by pink bollworms, which have become resistant to the genetically modified...

-Hindustan Times Gyan Chandra, 45, of Bhauri village in Sitapur had taken a loan of Rs 5 lakh from a finance firm in 2015 to purchase a tractor. Loan recovery agents allegedly crushed a Dalit farmer under a tractor in Sitapur on Saturday when he failed to deposit an arrear of the loan he had taken from a finance company, police quoted the victim’s brother as saying. Assistant superintendent of police (ASP), Sitapur,...