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...
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What India’s growth story conceals by Abhijit Patnaik
India’s performance at the Commonwealth Games in 2010 has been its best so far – second on the medals list.However, another kind of ‘competition’ ranked 84 countries in accordance with achievements in a different field this week. India was a lowly 67th. The field was hunger, measured by combining the proportion of people undernourished, the proportion of underweight children and the child mortality rate. The Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2010 –...
More »India's Games of Shame by Mitu Sengupta
Delhi is an anxious city this monsoon season, struggling to meet an onerous deadline. Preparations continue at a feverish pace for the 19th Commonwealth Games (CWG), which will bear down on the Indian metropolis October 3-14, along with some 8,500 athletes from the 71 states and territories that were once part of the British Empire. Around-the-clock construction and spells of heavy monsoon rain have turned Delhi into a swirl of mud...
More »All You Need To Know...by Arpita Basu and Neha Bhatt
The youth will not take no for an answer. Five years on, the RTI comes of age. At four feet something, Santosh’s energy belies her petite frame. The school dropout was introduced to RTI through activist Arvind Kejriwal, and now, at Parivartan’s Sundar Nagri office, she holds fort, helping others acquire everything from BPL and ration cards to school admissions through RTI. Threats and attacks by local authorities who dubbed her...
More »Much more than Commonwealth Games needed for lasting national prestige by Nandini Oomman
“India is Shining” in many ways, but the major hiccups in the run up to the Commonwealth Games (CWG), which opened on October 3 in New Delhi, highlight India's serious problems. Despite the colourful display of India's arts and culture at the grand opening ceremony, the frantic last minute interventions —including enlisting the Army (who did a remarkable job) to help with the final preparations — reveal the gross inefficiencies...
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