P Sainath, Rural Affairs Editor, The Hindu and 2007 Magsaysay award winner, shares with Pradeep Baisakh his views on the POSCO project, Odisha farmers’ suicides and the National Food Security Bill You have visited Odisha quite often. How, in your view, has it changed in the last 20 years? Inequalities have increased massively. Earlier, we used to hire jeeps which were falling apart. Today, to go to Kalahandi, you have Innovas,...

Anna Hazare's campaign against corruption has a curious side-effect. It has turned the spotlight on India's lack of pre-legislative transparency. We may accept or dismiss team Anna's Jan Lokpal draft but his movement — and the subsequent build-up of hope and betrayal — has unwittingly exposed the systemic opaqueness in which our laws are conceived, written, debated and passed. The Lokpal Bill 2011 is one among 67-odd bills listed as...

-The Business Standard   For a country whose cuisine uses so much edible oil, India’s dependence on imported cooking oil is as economically debilitating as its dependence on imported energy. Barring a short spell in the late eighties, when the country was nearly self-sufficient in edible oil production, the bulk of the cooking oil needs have been met through imports for decades. Even today, domestic oilSeed production does not meet even...

India registered a good 8.5 percent GDP growth in 2010-11 staving off the global impact of recession mainly due to the major recovery in the agriculture sector. The recorded foodgrain production in 2010-11 was the outcome of the initiatives of the state governments, the union government has now acknowledged. It was an innovation's galore to say the least if one takes into consideration the efforts of the 10 states that went...

-The Hindu   Farmers join hands with Greenpeace to seek ban on the company The Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (KRRS), a farmers' organisation, on Monday joined hands with Greenpeace and sought an immediate ban on all open field experiments of Genetically Modified (GM) crops in the country by Monsanto (a bio-technology company), in the wake of alleged violation of bio-safety norms by the multinational seed firm in Bijapur. The KRRS' demand comes in...