-News One   Though India’s social sector spending is higher than many other developing countries, one of its flagship welfare programs — the public distribution system (PDS) — is fraught with leakages, a World Bank report said Wednesday. The PDS scheme, which consumes around one percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and covers upto 25 percent of the poor households, has had limited success, as only 41 percent of the...

Massive grain procurement to meet the requirements under the proposed national food security law could drive out the private sector and have larger implications on the state of the domestic procurement market, a study on food and nutritional security has warned. Apart from impacting exports and cereal price in the open market, rising Public procurement will only make it costly to buy, store, transport and distribute grain, the study said, adding...

50 lakh tonnes of rice and wheat for all States/Union Territories at BPL prices Need to strike a balance between excess procurement and storage: Justice Bhandari ‘Whatever you procure, store it properly. The rest you can distribute to starving people' Responding to the concern expressed by the Supreme Court over malnutrition and starvation deaths, the Centre on Tuesday informed it of the decision to make an additional allocation of 50 lakh tonnes of...

The arrival of large quantities of wheat in the grain markets of the Punjab-Haryana region is a heart-warming sight, while poor storage is a matter of national shame. It was in April-May 1968, that the country witnessed the wonderful spectacle of large arrivals of wheat grain in the mandis of Punjab like Moga and Khanna. Wheat production in the country rose to nearly 17 million tonnes that year, from the previous...

Tihar jail today has the largest collection of charged or convicted top officials, a powerful ex-minister, sundry politicians and officials. Maharashtra had a teflon-coated chief minister who was ‘sacked’ to a cabinet post in Delhi after being long untouched by many scandals. Another just exited. A former Jharkhand chief minister is in jail on charges of looting his state treasury and accumulating funds abroad. The powerful founder of the Nationalist...