No matter where you draw the line, the fall in poverty is greater in high GDP growth years   Some plain facts and some ugly truths. The plain fact is that poverty in India has declined at a rapid pace during the UPA years post 2004. An ugly truth. When the Planning Commission released the estimates of poverty in India, on the basis of the household survey conducted by the NSS in...

I have never been to Brazil's "beautiful horizon", Belo Horizonte, the country's third-largest metropolitan area and an information and bio-technology hub, but I have followed the city's progress against what was once its enduring shame: hunger. In 1993, when 11% of its 2.5 million people lived in absolute poverty and a fifth of Belo's children went hungry, a newly-elected government declared that food was a fundamental right of every citizen,...

-The Business Standard   Too much grain, and no way to distribute it In about a month from now, the country’s ever-bulging foodgrain stockpile will bloat further to over 75 million tonnes, a record amount. This will be nearly two-and-a-half times the stipulated maximum food buffer. Worse, it will outstrip the available warehousing capacity (covered and open) of 63 million tonnes by a wide margin. Even today, a good part of the present...

-The Times of India   More than a decade after 23 people, mostly women and children, were killed when a mob set ablaze a shelter for Muslims huddled together for safety in Ode during the post-Godhra riots, a Gujarat court on Monday found 23 of the suspects guilty of murder and conspiracy. The Supreme Court-appointed special investigation team (SIT) has sought the death sentence for those convicted of murder.  The special court in...

In the mid-eighties there was a rumour which later turned out to be true: US livestock were being fed with foodgrains in order to ensure better quality of their meat. Later it proved to be Corn and not fine cereals like wheat and rice. The Indian intelligentsia was appalled and indignant: How come cows and buffaloes were fed with grains while millions of people continued to live below the poverty line...