The government on Thursday admitted to problems in storage as well as supply of sub-standard foodgrains to the poor after senior Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Brinda Karat expressed serious concern in the Rajya Sabha over grain rotting. “I do admit,” Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said after Ms. Karat charged the government with supplying rotten foodgrains to remote tribal areas. She showed samples of spoiled wheat and rice in the...

Two key issues Budget-2011 is seen as having failed to address are inflation and mass hunger. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee announced in his budget speech that the long-promised National Food Security Bill would be moved in Parliament “during the course of this year” but failed to make any financial allocation to back up this statement. Against the backdrop of fresh warnings by experts that the outlook is grim given the...

During a recent trip to a rural part of western India to report on rising food prices, I met two kinds of farmers — those with access to irrigation and those without. The differences between the two were stark. Those with drip irrigation or sprinklers invariably were reaping rich harvests and profits. But the vast majority of India’s farmers fall in the second camp: they water their crops by flooding their...

Agriculture department confirms high pesticide residues THE country’s regulators have failed to check the flow of pesticides into the food chain, suggests a monitoring report of the Department of Agriculture and the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, the country’s premier institute. Fruits, vegetables, poultry and milk are all laced with high pesticide residues —much above the maximum residue limits (MRL) set by the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act of 1954. Samples of...

Why women in Punjab villages shy away from offering their super-nutritious panjiri to guests from abroad, and instead offer them chips and coke? And, is there any connection between panjiri and failure of the Punjab farmers to save their own traditional (sustainable) seeds in favour of hybrids or new varieties dished out by PAU or private companies? 'There is a deep connection between the two,' says Arshinder Kaur, India coordinator for international...