It’s easier to get a bottle of soft drink than drinking water in Bankura’s Saltora. The CPM-controlled constituency is reeling from a severe water scarcity with the residents alleging that the Left has done precious little to provide purified drinking water in the area. Mrityunjoy Pandit, a 25-year-old resident of Saltora’s Ardhagram village, said the area had always faced water scarcity but this year it was acute because of the scanty rainfall...
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Food Price Hike Worsens Poverty in Asia by Marwaan Macan-Markar
An annual meeting of Asian finance ministers and central bank governors in Hanoi is set to address the fate of 64 million people in the region on the brink of extreme poverty. They are the worst affected by soaring food prices, which have hit record highs in the first two months of this year. "The issue of food price inflation and food security will indeed be one of the key topics...
More »PM’s panel suggests per person PDS allocation by Ravish Tiwari
The Prime Minister-appointed panel on Food and Public Distribution System (F&PDS) headed by Deputy Chairman Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia has suggested that the current system of distributing PDS foodgrain per household should be replaced with per capita allocation. According to National Sample Survey (NSS) data, lower income households have more members per family than higher income households, the panel has said in its draft report. Justifying its suggestion as a “progressive...
More »Rush in now, repent later by Siddharth Varadarajan
A transparent assessment of the costs and risks associated with India's ambitious nuclear plans must be made before any ground is broken at Jaitapur or elsewhere. You really have to hand it to the nuclear industry. In any other sphere of the economy, a major industrial disaster is likely to have adverse, long-term financial consequences for the company or companies whose product or activity was involved in the accident, regardless of...
More »‘Centre will await ICMR report on endosulfan' by J Balaji
A delegation from Kerala demands nationwide ban on pesticide Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Friday assured an all-party delegation from Kerala, led by its Health and Social Welfare Minister P.K. Sreemathy, that the Centre would await the report of the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) before deciding further on the request to ban Endosulfan nationwide. He reminded the delegates that the Kerala government had already banned the pesticide in 2005....
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