The proposed Food Security Bill should adopt a three-pronged strategy that constitutes a Universal Public Distribution System for all, low-cost foodgrains to the needy, and convergence in the delivery of nutrition safety net programmes.  In his latest budget speech, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee announced: “We are now ready with the draft Food Security Bill which will be placed in the public domain very soon.” Although no official draft has been...

The state must ensure that individual freedoms not only exist, but that everyone has the ability to experience them The ongoing theories of justice in mainstream political philosophy are very strongly dependent today on a way of thinking largely initiated by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, with an overwhelming concentration on a hypothetical “social contract” that the people of a sovereign state can be imagined to have endorsed. This presumed...

Though Palakkad district in Kerala, where the Coca Cola plant is situated is considered as the ‘rice bowl of Kerala’, a part of the district falling in the rain shadow region of the Western Ghats is drought prone. Plachimada, where the Hindustan Coca Cola Beverages Private Limited (HCBPL) factory was set up had been classified ‘arable’. The villagers are predominantly landless agricultural labourers with almost 80 percent of the population...

Once India sold poverty to foreigners; now it’s being asked to export its top anti-poverty scheme. Five foreign governments have asked the Centre to help them replicate the rural job scheme in their countries, officials have said. South Africa was the first to have shown interest in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), India’s “cushion for poor people’’ in the words of the World Bank. The other four too are African...

Firm asks farmers to switch to its second-generation product to delay resistance further  Pink bollworm resistant to pest-killing protein of Bt cotton in four districts Monsanto's advice ridiculous, say scientists For the first time anywhere in the world, biotech agriculture giant Monsanto has admitted that insects have developed resistance to its Bt cotton crop. Field monitoring in parts of Gujarat has discovered that the Bt crop is no longer effective against the...