From the Middle East to Madagascar, high prices are spawning land grabs and ousting dictators. Welcome to the 21st-century food wars. In the United States, when world wheat prices rise by 75 percent, as they have over the last year, it means the difference between a $2 loaf of bread and a loaf costing maybe $2.10. If, however, you live in New Delhi, those skyrocketing costs really matter: A doubling in...
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Let's have a fair deal by Harsh Mander
Land acquisition and involuntary displacement have been the fountainhead of enormous destitution of millions of invisible people since Independence. Generations of those sacrificed for ‘development’ are farmers and farm workers, and many are fragile tribal people and forest gatherers. By coercive displacement and dispossession, governments pauperise its poorest people, and its food-growers, so that the ‘nation’ can prosper and grow. Rage at persisting State injustice of coercive displacement frequently spills onto...
More »Undermining people’s power - A story of five years by Nikhil Dey
More than five years have passed since the world’s largest employment programme was launched in India. The scale of employment generated was not the only reason that this is a path breaking legislation. The MGNREGA is the first national law to establish rights in the development sector. It is demand based, and not constrained by arbitrary and restrictive selections like the Below Poverty Line (BPL) list. Any person living in a...
More »People turn a blind eye to NREGA work by Anindo Dey
Out of 228 panchayats chosen at random from one block out of the 249 blocks in the state, for comparison of NREGA wages, a maximum of 35% have got wages between Rs 21 to Rs 30 in 2010. The figures also show that in most of these panchayats, it is only a handful of families that have completed 100 days of work. In fact, it is hardly alarming that the...
More »A Lokpal Of Gloom by Saikat Datta and Anuradha Raman
Seven meetings and a stalemate. What now for the Lokpal Bill? It’s War Out There Seven meetings on, government and civil society reps drafting the Lokpal bill are split on four key issues Ambit * Civil society: PM and Supreme and High Court judges should be brought under Lokpal’s purview * Government: This is constitutionally untenable; PM should get immunity or should be investigated with adequate safeguards Scope * Civil society: MPs can...
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