Media, especially the electronic one, has found a special mention in Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia's views on the 12th five-year Plan. But, his feedback hasn't been all that flattering. The electronic media has been hauled up for 'disproportionately' showing widening disparities between the rich and the poor. "The perception of concentration of wealth and widening disparities is sharpened by the tendency of the media, including especially the...

It was a warm summer’s morning last week in teeming old Faridabad, a chaotic, industrial town where nearly half the people live in slums. Praveen Kumar was talking to students at a government girls’ senior secondary school. They complained about the broken fans, and they told him how there was just one sweeper to clean the stinky toilet. A lean, graying man with a receding hairline and neatly trimmed moustache, 51-year-old...

-The Economic Times   World Trade Organisation (WTO), the primary international body to help promote free trade has questioned India for providing subsidy on only indigenous ammonium sulphate and not on the Imported fertiliser. " WTO has asked India to furnish details as to why it has kept Imported ammonium sulphate out of the ambit of Nutrient-Based Subsidy (NBS) policy," a senior Fertiliser Ministry told PTI. The Fertiliser Ministry is still examining the...

-The Business Standard   Only anecdotal evidence has been available so far to back the assertion that there has been a sharp rise in agricultural wages. Now, field data bear out the trend. Collected by the Shimla-based Labour Bureau, these numbers show a roughly 50 per cent cumulative rise in rural labour wages in the past two years. The increase in Andhra Pradesh has been assessed at over 40 per cent...

The National Advisory Council has proposed a framework for the National Food Security Act. But its potential could be wasted by a flawed approach to the PDS. Two years have passed since the Central government announced that a draft National Food Security Act (NFSA) would be posted on the Food Ministry's website “very soon.” After prolonged deliberations, a detailed framework for this Act has recently been proposed by the National Advisory...