-Deccan Herald The Green Revolution has changed life in Indian villages, but the main beneficiaries were the landlords. Daily labourers remain poor and marginalised. The limits of using ever more fertiliser and pesticides are becoming apparent. Many farmers are confused because extension services want them to reconsider practices they were told to abandon not that long ago. A member of the Santal tribe, an Adivasi community, assesses things from the village perspective. Since independence...

-The Business Standard Of all the measures in the final Union Budget and Rail Budget for 2014-15, the micro-interventions that address food inflation by dismantling supply-side barriers are the most important. They carry added significance in a year when the monsoon has been deficient in a wide swathe of the western and northern parts of the country. The promise to bring down the hold of wholesale warlords in the Agricultural Produce Marketing...

-The Guardian India's PM points to Gujarat as an emblem of economic success. But despite impressive growth, the state lags behind on welfare Narendra Modi has just unveiled his first budget after winning a massive electoral victory on a development platform. The budget presented last week has disappointed those who were expecting stronger signals about a pro-market shift in economic policy, as well as in the stock market. However, the budget has...

-Deccan Herald The National Crime Records Bureau's data for 2013 is out, and farm suicides are pegged at 11,772 -- not very different from the earlier years.Many activists point out how these figures are in fact under-reported. In a country where the cultivators' numbers are plummeting drastically as the Census 2011 data shows, this unabated trend of farm suicides is something that any government should take note of. The central aspect to this...

-The Hindu   The national discourse is so superficial that it only talks of foreign direct investment, investment allowance, tax sops and the like which are just about a twentieth to a sixth of the national economy. It did not even notice paragraph 102 in the Union budget speech which is about half of India's economy. Commentators see facts hidden in budgets as the "devil's in the detail." This presumes that only...