Violence in West Bengal’s western districts has reached crisis proportions. Each day, one or more cadre member or sympathizer of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPM] is killed either by Maoists or the Trinamul Congress (TMC). The Maoists have found common cause with the TMC, a breakaway from the Congress Party in Bengal. Mamata Banerjee, whose authoritarian populism draws from both Juan and Evita Peron, leads the TMC. Backed...

Post-independence policies have taken away all securities of the small farmer Historically, compared to other developing economies, India has had relatively smaller agricultural land-holdings. Mixed farming and animal tending was the backbone of small and marginal rain-fed agriculture. Diverse food crops along with animal produce ensured relatively balanced nutrition. But policies in independent India reduced diversity while increasing the market dependence of small farms. Small farmers became victims of policies favouring...

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today said the economic reforms initiated by him almost two decades ago had reduced the number of poor, though much more was still needed to be done. “There is no evidence that the new economic policies have had an adverse effect on the poor,” Singh said at the annual conference of the Indian Economic Association here today. “The percentage of population below the poverty line has certainly not...

Interview with Joan Mencher, an anthropologist who has worked in India for long on issues such as agriculture, ecology and caste.   JOAN P. MENCHER is a Professor emerita of Anthropology from the City University of New York’s Graduate Centre and Lehman College of the City University of New York. She is the chair of an embryonic not-for-profit organisation, The Second Chance Foundation, which works to support rural grass-roots organisations...

Right time for policy reform The government is set to face disappointment on its expectation that the fertiliser subsidy will go down sharply this year due to a softening of international prices of fertilisers. It now appears almost certain that the total payable subsidy in 2009-10 may be around Rs 70,000 crore, against the budgetary provision of under Rs 50,000 crore. Since the government has made it clear that no additional...