Led by C. Rangarajan, it has been appointed by Manmohan In a significant move, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has formed an experts group chaired by the chief of Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council, C. Rangarajan, to examine the recommendations of the Sonia Gandhi-headed National Advisory Council on the proposed food security Bill. The move surprised members of the council who met here on Friday to discuss the draft of the National Food...

Three basic necessities of life — tapped drinking water, electricity connection and sanitation — together are not available to 82% of rural Indian households, a government survey has revealed. The three elements were key in the defining of India's new poverty line earlier this year by the Suresh Tendulkar committee, which said that 46% of rural Indians were poor. The poverty line was based on National Sample Survey Organisation report of...

"Inclusiveness" may be the UPA's winning mantra, but a government survey reveals that just 18% households in rural India have access to basis amenities -- drinking water, sanitation and electricity. Urban areas enjoy these facilities in 68% households. While the UPA regained power on its "aam aadmi" plank, the NSSO survey highlights that a vast majority in rural India still lack basic civic amenities. Around 65% of rural households have no sanitation...

Every afternoon at about four, a slight woman named Runi slips out of the cramped, airless room that she shares with her husband and their sixteen children. She skirts the drainage ditch in front of the building, then walks toward the pile of hardened dung cakes that people in this slum on the edge of the northeastern Indian city of Patna use for fuel. Dressed in a bright-yellow sari shot...

The forthcoming India visit of the US President, Mr Barack Obama, accompanied by Mr Thomas J. Vilsack, secretary of agriculture, and Dr Rajiv Raj Shah, administrator, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), is significant in the context of strengthening the Indo-US partnership in the field of agriculture production and sustainable food security. Several related issues will be discussed in Mumbai on November 6 and November 7 where an agriculture...