The case of the Food Security Bill gets curiouser and curiouser.  What started off as a fight between universalization and targeting has ended (or so it would seem) in a complete victory in the National Advisory Council, Government of India (NAC) for targeting through universalization (if such a thing was possible), with the honourable exception of Prof Jean Dreze, who has to be commended for his ‘note of disagreement’. On...

In 1957, the Communist Party of Kerala became the first democratically elected communist government in Asia. While many in the West feared that this election would help communism spread across South Asia and make Kerala the "Yan'an of India", the Keralite communists' actions were checked by Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress party's control of the federal coffers. Instead, from within the political bounds of India's divided government, Kerala initiated what has...

The Union government is reneging on its legal obligation to pay minimum wages, even to the most deprived sections of the population, in the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. If anyone wants to study the capacity of India's policymakers to turn a progressive piece of legislation upside down, the wage policy under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is a good place to...

India’s abject failure to address hunger and malnutrition has been laid bare yet again by its poor ranking — 67th of 84 countries — on a global hunger index put together by the International Food Policy Research Institute. The fact that it is home to 42 per cent of the world’s underweight children in the under-5 age group has resulted in the poor ranking. This is reason for concern as child...

Commissioner of cane development and sugar director A K Monnappa regretted that the benefits of research in agriculture sector were not reaching the farmers adequately though there have been rise in research activities in recent years. Inaugurating the four-day training programme on improved cultivation of sugarcane and sugar beet for the cane development staff of sugar factories in north Karnataka held at the University of Agricultural Sciences in Dharwad on Tuesday,...