THE All India Kisan Sabha, in a statement issued on July 10, has noted that the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (OECD-ICRIER) Report on the farm situation vindicates its position that the neoliberal economic policies have adversely affected the peasantry and accentuated the agrarian crisis in the country. The report has rightly diagnosed that farming in India has been unremunerative for two decades. According to the report the gross farm revenues fell 14 percent on average between 2000 and 2016.

THE central working committee of AIAWU met at Nasik (Maharashtra) on June 19-20. 32 comrades attended the meeting from Kerala, Telangana, Karnataka, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana. The general secretary’s report had noted that the all-round attack on the rural cash economy, the hard hit farming sector, unemployment and the loss of jobs in agriculture, in construction as well as in small-scale rural businesses, is hurting the mass of the rural people and driving them to ruin and starvation.

THE spate of lynchings related to rumours of child lifting has now affected large part of the country, with new incidents being reported every day. Clearly, this is not simply the unintended consequence of WhatsApp, as the government would have us believe. Or that some tinkering with WhatsApp, of course in close “consultation” with Facebook, the owners of WhatsApp, will solve the problem. The I&B ministry’s earlier initiative of regulating news portals, targeting critical news websites is now sought to be dovetailed into this narrative.

THE Bahujana Left Front (BLF) held ‘Mahadharnas’ at district collectorates in Telangana on June 26-27, highlighting the problems of the people that had come to light during a one-month-long house-to-house survey conducted by it in all villages in the state, and demanding that the TRS government solve them.The police not only created hurdles to obstruct participation of the people in the rallies and Mahadharnas, but also imposed prohibitory orders and arrested several leaders and hundreds of people when they tried to lay siege at the collectorates.

CPI(M)  Polit Bureau has issued the following statement on July 4A FIVE member constitution bench of the Supreme Court headed by the chief justice has upheld the rights of the elected state governments and reversed the decision of the Delhi High Court which had held that the lieutenant governor was the “administrative head” of Delhi.