-The Financial Express In a bid to curb pilferage of foodgrains in the Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS), the Centre on Saturday asked the states to opt for Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) under which the subsidy component is credited to bank accounts and allows the beneficiaries to buy foodgrains from the market. However, for implementing DBT, the states must complete digitisation of beneficiary list and seed bank account details for fund transfer....

-The Times of India Bhubaneswar: At a time when the state government is under attack for listing ineligible beneficiaries for ration cards under the National Food Security Act, it informed the assembly on Saturday that it has included a number of destitute and homeless families to counter the criticism. Food supplies and Consumer welfare minister Sanjay Das Burma said the state government has included 14,830 destitute families (54,892 persons) under the food...

It seems that not only civil society activists, but even the poor and marginalized themselves are not happy with the Centre’s social welfare policies. Following the recent protest by 150 eminent persons regarding failure of the NDA Government to take-up urgent measures for employment generation and ensuring food, nutrition & drinking water security in the backdrop of severe drought in roughly 1/3rd of Indian districts (please click here to access),...

-The Hindu In a much-needed measure to keep the consumption of chewing tobacco under check, the Delhi government has extended by a year the ban on the sale, purchase and storage of all forms of chewable tobacco — scented, flavoured and mixed — sold in forms such as gutka, pan masala, khaini and zarda. The extension of the ban has come after the previous notification expired recently. In 2012, a few...

Amidst the prevailing gloominess over agrarian crisis, a recently released report says that the growth rate of agricultural output in both India and China were the same during 2008-2013. The agricultural gross domestic product (GDP) of both these countries on an average grew at 3.3 percent per annum during that period. The latest available data from the 2016 Global Food Policy Report, however, indicates that the neighbouring countries of Sri Lanka...