-The Hindu The Shanta Kumar Committee's recommendations to unbundle the Food Corporation of India are in tune with U.S.-led demands raised in the World Trade Organization The Shanta Kumar Committee report, released last week, on a range of issues relating to procurement, storage and distribution of food grains is not only deeply flawed in its reading of the situation on food security, but also short on facts. It was prepared under the...

-Outlook A parsing of the recent expert report on food security reveals that most of its solutions do not meet the greater public good. The BJP's election manifesto had stated "that ‘universal food security' is integral to national security. BJP will take steps to ensure that the benefits of the scheme reach the common man and that the right to food does not remain an act on paper or a political...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Sections of wildlife biologists have questioned the methodology India has adopted for its tiger census, saying it does not yield results to accurately measure changes in numbers either within a particular region or across the country. The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), a non-government partner that was involved in the tiger estimation exercise, said the "double-sampling" approach the Union environment and forests ministry adopted was "not the best currently...

-The Hindu Opposition to amendments in the Land Acquisition Act that were brought through an ordinance by the Modi government recently is growing. Political parties, farmers' organisations affiliated to political parties as well as civil society movements across the country have expressed their reservation to it. On Wednesday, the Ajit Singh-led Rashtriya Lok Dal staged protests against the ordinance: across Uttar Pradesh, party activists raised slogans against the BJP-led NDA government, at...

-The Times of India The union health ministry's target of distributing 50 drugs free under the free essential drug scheme is so much lower than the hundreds of drugs being provided by States with a functioning free drugs scheme that it has left health officials in these States puzzled. After starting off by talking of distributing 348 drugs in the National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM) during the tenure of Dr Harsh...