12,000 farmers killed
New Delhi: The report by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture, which went unnoticed, said 11,728 farmers have committed suicide during the past five years. While there is no law to arrest bank defaulters in trade and industry, the Committee was shocked to learn that in some states farmers could be put behind bars for defaulting. Further, the MPs were shocked to see that in UP, Bihar and elsewhere farmers could not just be put behind bars, but the expenditure incurred on their food, transport and other things in jail is also recovered from them. Strangely, the committee is headed by Samajwadi Party’s Ram Gopal Yadav.
Girl child given away
Ramnagaram: Hardly 70 km off Karnataka’s global showpiece and capital city of Bangalore, in the Chief Minister’s electoral constituency, newborn girls are “given away” by parents because they can’t feed them. For the Banjara Lanbanis — traditionally a nomadic tribe — settled in villages under the Averahalli gram panchayat in Ramnagaram taluk, the willingness to “give away” female infants are fast becoming the norm. But even while citing years of squalor and administrative apathy as reasons, they maintain that the infants are not being “sold”.
