Eighty labourers, both men and women, are at work at Thiruvanduthurai village in Tiruvarur district of Tamil Nadu, about 325 km south of Chennai. They are digging a pond - about an acre wide and six feet deep - funded under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, or MGNREGS. Outside the work perimeter, two middle aged men look on, worried. P. Murugan and K. Govindaraj are farmers from the...
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Centre keen to check subsidy on food security by Sanjeeb Mukherjee & Saubhadra Chatterji
With an aim to introduce the much-awaited Food Security Bill in the monsoon session (July-August) of Parliament, the food ministry has started parleys to bridge the gap between an expert panel appointed by the Prime Minister and the National Advisory Council (NAC). While it wants to ensure smooth supply of foodgrains to the target groups, the ministry, in an interaction with NAC on Wednesday, made it clear that it is equally...
More »Too bad to swallow by Milind Murugkar , Bharat Ramaswami and Ashok Kotwal
The National Advisory Council (NAC) has now sketched out the “contours of a national food security bill”. The goal is worthy: “Protecting all children, women and men from hunger and food deprivation.” To some, the bill might appear utopian. The truth is worse. The bill reminds us of John Stuart Mill’s denunciation of a government policy of his day: “What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be...
More »Cash a bad idea, make PDS more reliable, say protesters by Atikh Rashid
The ITO crossing was full of protest chants against the government’s move to provide cash instead of subsidised food and fuel through the Public Distribution System (PDS). Women from slums and resettlement colonies across Delhi-NCR and representatives of 30-odd organisations that participated in the protest — organised by ‘Rozi-Roti Aadhikar Abhiyan’ — expressed discontentment over the decision. The government should strengthen the PDS system instead of replacing it with a new system,...
More »The UID Project and Welfare Schemes by Reetika Khera
This article documents and then examines the various benefits that, it is claimed, will flow from linking the Unique Identity number with the public distribution system and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. It filters the unfounded claims, which arise from a poor understanding of how the PDS and NREGS function, from the genuine ones. On the latter, there are several demanding conditions that need to be met in order...
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