THE protests across France against the bill proposing changes in the labour laws have been described as the biggest and longest protests since the French Revolution. What we saw indicate that it could well be an understatement. Over 1.2 million marched the streets of Paris on June 14, 2016 which happens to be the birth anniversary of the eternal revolutionary Che Guevara. Across France yet another 1.5 million workers are reported to have protested on the same day making it the biggest protest with never-seen-before kind of mass participation.

ON May 3, 2016, around 1000 peasants and students from all the eight districts of the Marathwada region, led by the AIKS and the SFI, broke two police barricades and marched right inside the compound of the Aurangabad Divisional Commissioner’s office. This militant and unprecedented action was conducted on the burning demands related to the grim drought situation in the region.

WHEN the BJP government announced, in its latest budget, that it is determined to double farmers’ income in next seven years, the nation looked with awe. Critiques pondered over how that could happen in such a short time. The analysts scanned the budget documents to find out the allocations for agrarian infrastructure. But the government silently worked its way to create a new agrarian structure that coerces the small and marginal farmers to part with their precious piece of land and become daily wage labourers in the by-lanes of urban landscape.

AZHAGAR, a young farmer from Tamilnadu aged only 26 years committed suicide after officials of a private financial firm seized his tractor to recover Rs Two lakh loan from him. The news of the seizure of the tractor had been reported widely on the same day that Vijay Mallya, accused of defrauding banks of over Rs 9000 crore was allowed by the Narendra Modi-led BJP government to flee the country. Azhagar was physically assaulted and insulted by the officials of the private financial firm.

THE union budget 2016-17 is a serious rightward shift to further fortify the domination of monopoly trade and agri-business interests over agro-processing and marketing sector, intensifying the neo-liberal reforms which are the root cause of the current acute crisis in agriculture.  The proposals of 100 percent FDI through the FIPB- Foreign Investment Promotion Board route on food products and processing and to start e-platform by amending APMC Act for marketing of agro produce are two obvious examples in support of big capital and MNCs.