West Bengal: An agrarian crisis looms over the State as farmers commit suicide in spite of a bumper crop. THE topic of suicide figured repeatedly in Safar Molla's conversations with his neighbours a few days before his death. The 18-year-old marginal farmer from Kaltikuri village in Bardhaman district's Bhatar block talked about it quite casually, in fact even jocularly. Everybody in the village knew he was up to his neck in...

India's economic growth has added over seven million new jobs every year for almost a quarter of a century. Workers have seen their wages - adjusted for prices - rise by nearly 3% a year. Poverty rates among wage workers and the self-employed have fallen. Going forward, with swelling numbers of new entrants - and more women entering the job market , as was the case during east Asia's rapid...

Hariyali Kisaan Bazaar, India’s biggest rural retail chain by sales, which operates 230 stores across eight states and had seen good growth in the past two years, said it had seen a fall in rural demand in the past two to three months. A drop in prices of potatoes, onions and some other vegetables, leading to low realisation for farmers, and an increase in cost of fertiliser, are reasons for these...

-The Economist   Opposition to the world’s biggest biometric identity scheme is growing FOR a country that fails to meet its most basic challenges—feeding the hungry, piping clean water, fixing roads—it seems incredible that India is rapidly building the world’s biggest, most advanced, biometric database of personal identities. Launched in 2010, under a genial ex-tycoon, Nandan Nilekani, the “unique identity” (UID) scheme is supposed to roll out trustworthy, unduplicated identity numbers based on...

-The Economist   A huge identity scheme promises to help India’s poor—and to serve as a model for other countries INDIA’S economy might be thriving, but many of its people are not. This week Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, said his compatriots should be ashamed that over two-fifths of their children are underfed. They should be outraged, too, at the infant mortality, illiteracy, lack of clean drinking water and countless other curses that...