-NDTV Mumbai: The National Food Security Bill and its benefits are being debated in the country but they have little meaning for Sonabai Patni's family of five, who lives under a plastic sheet in South Central Mumbai's Elphinstone area. Teeming once with textile mills, Elphinstone is now home to shiny corporate offices. A small patch of the pavement enclosing one of this office complexes near Kamla Mills was home to the...
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Food security: How the states feed India
-The Indian Express Trendsetters & tweakers Act one Chhattisgarh already has a food security law in place. It became last December the first state to pass a food security bill, which covers several sections not under existing schemes. The Act makes food entitlement a right and depriving anyone of that an offence. If PDS grains, for instance, are being diverted, the officials involved will face penal provisions. The Act also seeks to empower women...
More »A grain of common sense-Sreenivasan Jain
-The Business Standard Chhattisgarh proves no cash transfer or UID is needed to make PDS work Viewed from a ration shop in Surguja in the largely poor tribal north of Chhattisgarh, the arguments for and against the food security Bill seem way off the mark. We had travelled there to see first-hand Chhattisgarh's much-celebrated transformation of its broken, corrupt public distribution system (a recent survey found that wastage of PDS grain dropped...
More »Bihar govt criticises 'laxity' by Food Corporation of India
-PTI The Bihar government on Tuesday alleged that there was laxity by Food Corporation of India in taking custom-milled rice of paddy (CMR) procured by the state and decided to draw the attention of the Centre to it. "Despite assurance of senior officers of FCI on taking CMR, laxity could be seen among corporation officials," Bihar Food minister Shayam Rajak said. He told a review meeting of his department that the FCI...
More »What we need is not a food security Bill but a hunger elimination Act -Arvind Virmani
-The Times of India In the decade or so that i was at the Planning Commission, i always had advisory responsibility for the food ministry/public distribution system, among other issues of development policy. It did not take very long to find out that the fundamental problem with the system was about so-called "leakages" abetted by corruption: One soon learnt that the Food Corporation of India (FCI) was one of the most...
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