Monsoon this year has failed most of India, causing drought in even well-irrigated and rainfed areas. Ravleen Kaur reports how our food preferences are making us vulnerable to drought Hari Achal Singh has been a farmer for as long as he can remember. And that’s as long as India has been independent. He recalls his childhood when his family depended on rain for irrigation. “We grew arhar (red gram), bajra...

The tragic demise of Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy is a blow to the rights approach to development in India. YSR, as the medical doctor-turned-CM was popularly known, was a pioneer of at least one hundred path breaking rural schemes such as the NREGS and old age pensions that were offered to the poor not as dole but as a matter of right. For records, the first...

The time has come for a comprehensive right-to-food law to tackle the deprivation and food insecurity that haunts India.  Over the last decade or so, a series of developments have drawn attention to the problem of food security. These are the persistence of hunger in many parts of the country being juxtaposed with food surpluses and stocks; the adverse impact of globalisation on agriculture and rising food prices resulting in...

With shift to a high-input cash cropping system, the debt process bears an uncanny resemblance to the ‘catastrophe’ If it does not rain over the next week, farmers of Petlawad tehsil and its neighbouring regions in Jhabua might have to go the same way as their brethren in Vidarbha did. Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan recently declared Jhabua, along with 36 other districts, drought-hit. The agricultural apparatus in...

THE LAUNCH of free market liberalisation in 1991 triggered widespread prosperity for the Indian middle classes, making them the showpiece of India’s muchfêted economic boom. But little has ever changed for the bulk of the country’s poor, hundreds of millions of who continue to barely scrape through from day to day, doomed to extreme poverty and, consequently, malnutrition, disease and death. For decades, many among these millions have survived, however...