IRONY RUNS its play every year in India as food grains rot in godowns while 23 crore people go hungry every day. GOI Monitor talks to food and trade policy analyst Devinder Sharma on the issues stalking agriculture and public distribution One of the reasons for surplus food not reaching the needy is that states are not picking up the grain. Why is this happening? Food grain procurement and distribution is...
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Census rewriting SC, ST narrative-Anil Padmanabhan & Remya Nair
-Live Mint Latest houselisting data demonstrates a visible growth in the material well-being of the two groups Indians, all of them, across class and caste, traded up over the past decade, a period of rapid and record economic growth—that’s the counter-intuitive message in the latest update to Census 2011. According to the so-called houselisting data released by the census, scheduled castes (SCs) and scheduled tribes (STs) have, like the rest of the country,...
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After a sluggish start, the south-west monsoon is on the upswing, covering newer areas by the hour. Director-General of India, Meteorological Department, L.S. Rathore told The Hindu on Sunday that the system had already covered about 40 per cent of the total geographical area of the country and the coverage could go up to at least 50 per cent by Monday evening. The rapid progress means the deficiency of rainfall at the...
More »World close to ending polio, yet it's a tough foe
-AP Less than four months ago the world was cheered to learn that India had gone a full year with no new cases of polio, a landmark that left only Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria on the World Health Organization's list of countries where the disease is endemic. But the battle is far from over, judging by the WHO's latest expressions of alarm. It says that in both Nigeria and Afghanistan the number...
More »Dams and the Damned-Ramachandra Guha
In September 2010, a large public meeting was held in Guwahati to discuss the impact of large hydroelectric projects in the Northeast. In attendance was Jairam Ramesh, then the minister of environment and forests in the government of India. Ramesh heard that the people of Assam were worried that the hundred and more dams being planned in Arunachal Pradesh would reduce water-flows, increase the chance of floods, and deplete fish...
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