Take a lesson from Commonwealth Games mascot Shera and “leap ahead” instead of whimpering like a “timorous puppy”, a food rights campaigner has said in a sharp attack on Sharad Pawar. The criticism in a Delhi newspaper has come from Belgium-born Jean Dreze, a prominent member of the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council. He is ostensibly riled by reports that Pawar’s food ministry has rejected two of the council’s key proposals...

Five years ago, when the proposed National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) was a subject of fierce controversy, Bunker Roy compared the attitude of the government to that of a dog who crosses a road half-way, can’t decide whether to go forward or backward, and gets run over. This enlightening image applies again today, in the context of the proposed National Food Security Act (NFSA). The National Advisory Council (nac) discussed...

"To implement the nac's two proposals, the grain requirement is estimated to be over 70 million tonnes. We have shared that any requirement of the grain over 55 million tonnes would be difficult to meet," an official source said. The latest challenge to the proposed food security law has come from the government’s procurement agencies as the Food Ministry procures only 55 million tonnes of foodgrains a year against the 70...

ASSAM is on the brink of a movement, like the one that ended with the 1984 Assam Accord. This time the concern is not illegal immigrants but dams proposed upstream in Arunachal Pradesh. In the past year and a half people in Assam have held a number of protests. The latest one was on September 10 when Union Minister of Environm ent and Forests Jairam Ramesh visited Guwahati to consult academics,...

The department of food and public distribution has rejected both proposals of the National Advisory Council (nac) to provide food security, saying the government risked running up against supply constraints and taking on an unsustainable fiscal burden. The rejection by the ministry of consumer affairs, food and public distribution means that both nac, headed by Congress party president Sonia Gandhi, and the government will have to go back to the drawing board...