The National Advisory Council (NAC) had been widely credited with framing three pro-people legislations — the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), the Right to Information (RTI) and the Forest Rights Act — under the UPA 1 government. So when NAC 2 began discussions on the Food Security Act in mid-2010, expectations were high. The initial vision of an act with a universal public distribution system (PDS), extensive children's entitlements...

The government's biggest welfare programme could see an almost 60 per cent increase in funding. The forthcoming Budget is likely to make a provision of Rs 64,000 crore (Rs 640 billion) for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in 2011-12, against Rs 40,100 crore (Rs 401 billion) in the current fiscal. The huge increase in outlay will be mainly on account of two factors: Linking wages under the scheme with...

Driven by trade interest, EU is pushing Endosulfan for POP listing Elimination of Endosulfan is expected to severely impact pollination and India’s farming India is today the second largest producer of horticulture crops (fruits at vegetables) and annually produces over 215 million mt (2008-09 figures source Ministry of Agriculture). This is almost as much as India’s total food grain production of 235 million mt (2008-09 figures source Ministry. of Agriculture). India’s export...

Fast-growing emerging nations are taking increasingly aggressive actions to beat back rising food prices as they grow more worried of threats to stability if prices don't start to retreat. Developing-market governments have unveiled a laundry list of measures—including price caps, export bans and rules to counter commodity speculation—to keep food costs from disrupting their economies as price spikes that some had hoped were temporary have stretched into the new year. Some...

Fundamentally, our current crisis in food supplies as well as food prices arises out of the sidelining of Jawahar Lal Nehru’s dictum “everything else can wait but not agriculture”. Unfortunately, the last twenty years have been characterised by very low rates of agricultural growth, averaging around one percent per annum. This is almost equal to the rate of GDP growth during the last half century of British rule. In effect, in...