-Moneycontrol.com The government had tried to get the Food bill passed in Lok Sabha in the recently-concluded Budget session, but the debate on the proposed legislation could not be concluded amid din. Planning Commission Member Abhijit Sen today termed it exaggeration, the likely huge rise in government's subsidy burden on account of implementing the proposed National Food Security Bill, as suggested in some quarters. Introduced in Parliament in 2011, the Food Bill, which...

Argumentative Indians are at it again! After sparring over the poverty line and the actual number of poor, India's renowned economists have fired up a fresh debate over the extent of malnutrition. In the earlier debate, the Planning Commission ‘reduced' poverty on paper disregarding NSSO and official committees, including the NCEUS, which determined that 77% Indians survived on less than Rs 20 a day. Columbia university economist Arvind Panagariya has...

-The Hindu Chennai: India's economic boom in the first decade of the 21st Century coincided with an increase in the magnitude of poverty, economist Prabhat Patnaik said here on Saturday. "There has been a period of positive growth as far as the GDP is concerned. But during this period , there has been an increase in magnitude of absolute poverty," he said. "While the Planning Commission insists that proportion of population below...

-The Business Standard How to fix the agricultural pricing mess The government's move to get the mandate of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) reviewed afresh by an expert panel needs to be viewed in a broader perspective - one that weighs political populism against economic logic. It has been argued that minimum support prices (MSPs) have been raised often - and supposedly partly for political reasons - during the...

-Down to Earth The country's 76 million poor have been denied the right to claim subsidised foodgrain under public distribution system The government has denied 76 million people in the country eligible to access public distribution system (PDS) the benefits of the food security system. For the past 20 years, the government has not cared to refresh its data and has been distributing foodgrain according to the population figure of 1991. Worse, the...