Prof Shenggen Fan, Director General, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington DC, said that hunger and malnutrition continued to be challenging problems among 29 countries of the world, and India was one of them. As such, food and nutrition availability should be the major development goals in the national policy of these developing nations. Delivering a special lecture on the second day of the 93rd annual conference of the Indian...

If the price rise is due to production shortfall, how does one explain the near doubling of the price within a few days? The sharply rising onion prices have raised the suspicion that speculators are manipulating a shortage situation. First, a few facts. In retail markets, onion prices have soared from Rs 10-11 per kg in June to as high as Rs 70-80 on Dec 21. Even more significantly, prices zoomed by...

Indian civil society was dismayed and horror-struck when human rights activist Dr Binayak Sen, who has spent over three decades caring for the poor in tribal areas of central India, was sentenced to life imprisonment for ‘sedition’ along with two others, Piyush Guha and Narayan Sanyal by a Raipur Sessions Court judge.  Protests are taking place everywhere in the country and the members of India’s vibrant civil society, peoples’ movements,...

Even as the media celebrate the Mercedes Benz deal in the Marathwada region as a sign of “rural resurgence,” the latest data show that 17,368 farmers killed themselves in the year of the “resurgence.” When businessmen from Aurangabad in the backward Marathwada region bought 150 Mercedes Benz luxury cars worth Rs. 65 crore at one go in October, it grabbed media attention. The top public sector bank, State Bank of India,...

Last fortnight, the Supreme Court agreed allegations of misappropriation of NREGS funds in Orissa are not without basis. Debabrata Mohanty tracks the scheme and the controversy it is in: FACT HUNT In May-June 2007, the Centre for Environment and Food Security (CEFS) surveyed how an MGNREGS programme was being carried out in the 100 poorest villages of Orissa’s “hunger bowl” of KBK (Kalahandi-Bolangir-Koraput) districts, as well as the districts of Nuapada, Nabarangpur...