-The Hindu The State, in an affidavit perused by Supreme Court on Friday, said it received information about the causes of farmers' deaths through reports collected from Collectors. The Tamil Nadu government on Friday blamed heart attacks, illness, and “in certain cases”, suicides for deaths of its farmers reeling under severe drought. The State, in an affidavit perused by the Supreme Court on Friday, said it had received information about the causes of...

-Frontline.in The British government, on the basis of an 1891 report on the subhuman living conditions of “Pariahs” by James H.A. Tremenheere, Acting Collector of Chengleput, assigned 12 lakh acres of land for distribution to the “depressed classes” of the Madras Presidency to empower them socially and economically. But more than 100 years later, much of this land is in the possession of non-Dalits, and the struggle to reclaim them has...

-The Indian Express A good, even if not record, wheat crop along with improved prices brings cheer after two not-so-good years. Dewas (Madhya Pradesh): Manohar Singh Sendhav cannot offhand recall the number of trips he has made to the Dewas mandi or to the shining steel silo at Durgapur, some 10 km away. Undaunted by the searing noon heat, this farmer from Chandakhedi village in Dewas district’s Sonkatch taluka watches his tractor driver...

-Scroll.in The Five Year plan is gone, several long- and short-term plans are in, but the government is still mapping growth in a supposedly market economy. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the dismantling of the more than six-decades-old Planning Commission in his Independence Day speech on August 15, 2014, it seemed that India was at last formally breaking with the notion of planning, a socialist recipe for the anarchic market...

-Hindustan Times The animating impulse of Indian politics, pundits of all stripes insist, is youthful aspiration: fearless young people throwing off the shackles of caste and class to Whatsapp their way to what the Prime Minister likes to call “vikas”. Parties like the Bharatiya Janta Party understand this, the argument goes, and are handsomely rewarded; the opposition doesn’t, and is doomed to failure. But a recent CSDS-KAS survey paints a rather different picture:...