Ranchi, Sept. 22: Chastised for its rural job scheme fiasco earlier this month, a mortified state has decided not to send nominations for an urban excellence award announced by the Centre for 65 cities, entrusted with the task of implementing development projects under Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM). In Jharkhand, three cities — Ranchi, Jamshedpur and Dhanbad — qualified as mission cities. But tripartite agreements were signed only...

The Prime Minister’s Independence Day address to the nation was particularly disappointing this year. The Prime Minister has said, yet again, that "the country needs another Green Revolution". But what’s distressing is that his government has not even formulated a draft strategy for such a revolution in the last five years, let alone launch it. Why? Largely because the agriculture minister has not shown the slightest interest in a "Second...

Monsoon this year has failed most of India, causing drought in even well-irrigated and rainfed areas. Ravleen Kaur reports how our food preferences are making us vulnerable to drought Hari Achal Singh has been a farmer for as long as he can remember. And that’s as long as India has been independent. He recalls his childhood when his family depended on rain for irrigation. “We grew arhar (red gram), bajra...

The time has come for a comprehensive right-to-food law to tackle the deprivation and food insecurity that haunts India.  Over the last decade or so, a series of developments have drawn attention to the problem of food security. These are the persistence of hunger in many parts of the country being juxtaposed with food surpluses and stocks; the adverse impact of globalisation on agriculture and rising food prices resulting in...

THE LAUNCH of free market liberalisation in 1991 triggered widespread prosperity for the Indian middle classes, making them the showpiece of India’s muchfêted economic boom. But little has ever changed for the bulk of the country’s poor, hundreds of millions of who continue to barely scrape through from day to day, doomed to extreme poverty and, consequently, malnutrition, disease and death. For decades, many among these millions have survived, however...