-First Post Sonia Gandhi wants the chief ministers of fourteen states in which the Congress party is in power to role out the food security scheme in letter and spirit, and in quick time. Some media reports suggest that the scheme will be rolled out on August 20, which also happens to be the birth anniversary of Sonia's late husband Rajiv Gandhi. While there seems to be a great hurry to launch...

-The Business Standard   The food security ordinance would empower poor urban migrants to challenge denial of ration cards The new Food Security Ordinance provides virtually nothing and yet quite a lot. What it provides is food as a legal right. And that means a lot for a poor migrant in a city chawl, with no local address proof, having left all identity cards back in their native village and unable to claim anything...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: After the ambitious food security law, the UPA government is preparing another populist scheme to expand the supply of subsidised edible oil and pulses through the countrywide network of ration shops in the next two to three months. "It will be the next major thing. We are working at the earliest. We propose that state governments purchase pulses and edible oil either through imports or locally. We...

-The Economic Times MUMBAI: The Union Cabinet this week passed an ordinance to implement the National Food Security Bill (NFSB). The bill guarantees legal entitlement of food grains at a subsidised price to ~67 per cent of India's population. The ordinance will come into effect immediately once it is signed by the President. But it also needs to be approved by both the houses of Parliament in the monsoon session within six...

-The Hindu While the focus is on pilgrims, nobody is talking about the fate of boys and men who came from their villages in the Mandakini valley to earn during the yatri season It is one week since Uttarakhand's worst disaster in living memory. Flash floods resulting from extremely intense rainfall swept away mountainsides, villages and towns, thousands of people, animals, agricultural fields, irrigation canals, domestic water sources, dams, roads, bridges, and...