The recent high-pressure tactics to introduce genetically engineered food crops in India are another rude reminder that Western agribusiness companies have a deeprooted strategy to obtain a stranglehold on India’s food and agriculture system. In a review of recent trends titled ‘Food Without Choice’ (The Tribune, November 1) Prof Pushpa M. Bhargava (who was nominated by the Supreme Court in the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee to protect safety concerns), an internationally...

The Union Cabinet on Thursday decided to amend the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, (RTE) to make it more disabled-friendly by including children with autism, cerebral palsy and multiple disabilities within its ambit. This has been a pending demand of the disability sector which was up in arms in August this year over Union Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry confining the provision mandating that Schools...

Barely 50 km from the capital of India's most populous state, in Daulatpur village in Barabanki district, a mini agriculture revolution is taking place. What 41-year-old Ram Saran Verma began in 1996 on a 6-acre plot of land in a remote rural pocket has now grown into an 85-acre empire that feeds hundreds of workers, besides providing indirect employment to many more. "The urge to do something beyond the routine...

I first met Paul Samuelson in 1962, as a student at MIT. A decade later, I had the pleasure of co-authoring with him a paper on the Theory of Index Numbers (American Economic Review, 1974) and another in the Royal Economic Society’s Economic Journal (1984). I last met him a couple of years back, on a sidewalk in Belmont, Massachussets. He was driving down the street and stopped upon seeing...

It was a night out under the stars. These were not city slickers but a group of villagers from Salona. On the way down from Chikhaldhara hill station in Amravati district, the darkness of the cold night is lit by small fires. Groups of people huddle around the flickering flames. Their children lie swaddled in thin bedclothes which cannot keep the chill away. Shivlal Belsare and his wife are finishing off...