Protests marked the 10th anniversary of the introduction of genetically modified (GM) Bt cotton in the country. Angry farmers urged parliamentarians to hold a special session to discuss the issue and ban the technology. Charging a few seed companies, particularly Monsanto, with monopolising the seed industry and setting the agenda for the government, social activists urged policy-makers and farmers to reject the hype around Bt cotton and demanded a comprehensive review....

The wages under the government's flagship rural employment scheme have risen following adjustments for price rise, creating apprehension that this may add to the inflationary pressures by making farming more expensive.  The government had early last year benchmarked wages under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act to retail inflation to ensure a real wage of Rs 100 a day to workers seeking employment under the scheme.  Under the first such...

-The Economic Times Any estimate of poverty, more correctly of the poverty line that determines how many Indians live in poverty, is bound to be contentious. It is naive to believe that any estimate, whatever its methodology, will find unanimous acceptance.  Hence the decision to appoint yet another technical committee to estimate the poverty line will not achieve anything. It will merely buy the government time and deflect some of the criticism...

The ongoing debate over the incidence of poverty in India, often assuming surreal proportions, shows that there is indeed a ‘philosophy of poverty’ guiding current economic reforms. The loot of our country’s resources that is taking place both through these reforms, which continue to widen gross inequalities, and through the open plunder of our resources for private gain — as reflected in the series of mega scams — require the legitimacy...

Even as the opposition took the government to task for tweaking consumption data to show that the number of poor in India has declined, as first highlighted on Monday by Mint columnist Himanshu, Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia defended the methodology used for the calculation by the plan panel. Ahluwalia said the inclusion of money spent on the mid-day meal scheme in so-called private household expenditure was correct because...