In Danta village, 15km from Bhilwara city, 30-odd women start filing in at 8.30 am daily to resume work on building a concrete water reservoir. The women are among the 2,000 people in the village who have got work under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) since the scheme, promising 100 days of work a year to one adult member of every rural family, was launched two years ago...

While the jury is still out on whether Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh did the right thing by putting a moratorium on the use of Bt brinjal, or whether he simply played to the gallery by only taking into account the concerns of the environmentalists, policy-makers need to ponder over some other implications. The introduction of Bt cotton, for instance, led to production more than doubling between 2002-03 and 2007-08, from...

Another food crisis? This time it’s not shortages but prices—a plain failure of responsive policy and execution. Zooming food prices are raising political temperatures yet again. The rumblings, for once, are not merely restricted to the opposition parties, but evident within the ruling coalition as well. Though attacks from across the political spectrum have become a bit subdued of late, the target remains Union agriculture and food minister Sharad Pawar. And...

With a large number of people living on subsistence level of income, the government has to safeguard their interest by ensuring availability of food grains at an affordable price. Success of any policy or programme to this effect depends on growth in agriculture production and procurement of wheat and rice, the main staple foodgrains. Though the performance of agriculture has not been uniform throughout and its growth rate has varied...

In an alleged case of honour killing in Ghaziabad, a man bludgeoned his 21-year-old daughter to death two-and-a-half years after she eloped and married a man from her neighbourhood in Ram Park, Loni. The woman had come to meet a relative of her husband in the same village when the incident took place round 1.30 pm on Sunday. The father of the victim, Haroon, works in a Dairy. He was...