HINDIYANKALAN, India – One afternoon last November, 10 people in this eastern Indian village sat in a circle on a dirt road and told us about their fight against hunger. We wanted to know: What would drive a person to eat a poisoned root? I was on a research assignment with my colleague Ankita Aggarwal from the Centre for Equity Studies, a New Delhi think tank. It was part of a...
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Starving in India: A Fight for Life in Bihar-Ashwin Parulkar
BANWARA, India – In the fall of 2006, Gita Devi was pregnant with her sixth child when her family fell on hard times. A severe drought made it more difficult than ever to find farm work here in India’s northeastern plains. The family couldn’t afford food. It was unable to get a government ration card to buy grains and rice at steep discounts, even though it clearly was poor enough to...
More »The ‘corruption’ of the wretched
-Live Mint No other social sector programme has been criticized for being successful as has the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). So much so that it is not the inefficiency of the MGNREGS that is a problem, but its success that is seen as the reason for several problems facing the country. Even though it is still a small programme with annual spending of less than Rs.35,000 crore,...
More »Not much on the plate by Samar Halarnkar
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,...
More »Delete the errors to save the census by Swati Narayan
Unless data gathering for the Socio Economic and Caste Census is refined, the exercise could cast out the real claimants. Have the census enumerators recently knocked on your door with swanky tablet computers in hand? If they have, it's because they have begun to go door-to-door in most States to complete the final phase of the Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC). This mammoth exercise is being coordinated by more than...
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