Links to some of my articles over the last six months in Deccan Chronicle newspaper..............
Given the unpredictable nature of agricultural income, farmer A. Mahipal Reddy in Arutla village said his girl child was denied a seat by Johnson Grammar School in Hyderabad and house owners in Champapet refused to even let out their house despite being of the same caste. "Marketing personnel from banks seeking to provide personal loans cut the call as soon as they hear that I am a farmer," he said.
"Caste boycotts can occur if fishermen increase prices, washermen raise charges or Madigas refuse to play drums. When they target a community, the VDC gathers members of the other castes. That is made possible by the hierarchical caste structure. One community oppresses another caste below it in the caste structure, allowing the social order to continue. Even the cheque power that sarpanches exercise over funds in the panchayat were curtailed by making the signature of their deputies usually, from the upper castes, a necessity,” Prof. Sujatha Surepally, Sociology dept, Satavahana University
When farmers S. Surya Prakash and K. Kurmanna saw the concrete canals being laid down at the under-construction ethanol factory near Chittanoor village in Marikal Mandal, Narayanpet district, Telangana, their worst fears were confirmed.
These concrete canals,
they believe, will divert their precious agricultural water from the
fields to the factory, leaving them in such penury that they will be
forced to leave their villages every year to work as ‘Palamuru’ or
migrant labour elsewhere in the country.
Despite the tall promises by the TRS government of KG to PG free education, the allocations to education have left a lot to be desired. The K. Chandrashekar Rao government inaugurated the only model showpiece of the state’s first KG to PG institution in Sircilla, the assembly constituency of K.T. Rama Rao, a state minister and son of KCR. Even the institute was developed by a corporate house under its corporate social responsibility in partnership with the state government.
https://thewire.in/education/telangana-education-sector-2023-budget
https://thewire.in/agriculture/telangana-farmers-tenant-survey-findings
Presenting the report, Kiran Vissa of the RSV, said that the claim that tenant farmers cannot be identified as the land they till is ever-changing does not hold because the survey found that 72% of tenant farmers tend the same land for more than three years. Only a minority rent the land for one or two years.
https://thewire.in/rights/annamayya-dam-flood-victims-still-homeless
Almost one year has passed since the Andhra Pradesh government promised to build houses for the victims of the floods caused by a breach of the Annamayya project’s earthen bund over Cheyyeru river on November 19, 2021. However, till date, all that G. Siva Reddy, one of the victims of the floods, has to call a home is a makeshift tarpaulin tent erected where his home once stood.