The second green revolution found a mention in the Union Budget as a big achievement for the government. But, while paddy production went up manifold in eastern India, did it help its producers? In Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s home state of West Bengal, there was agony everywhere in the last few months, as paddy and potatoes were selling cheap and pauperised cultivators were killing themselves. The government was nowhere to procure...

Food price inflation, and inflation in general, has become less of an issue. But it isn’t an issue that will go away. Give it till June and inflation is likely to inch up again. Competition is a good antidote against price increases. It ensures efficiency and reduces price volatility. Logically, food price inflation should trigger and stimulate agricultural reform, so there is competition and supply-side changes can occur. But in...

The recommendations of the Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Access to Universal Healthcare are significant because they make explicit the need to contextualise health within the rights. However, the problem with the report is that it does not ask why many of the same recommendations that were made by previous committees have not been implemented. The HLEG neither recognises the problems, constraints and compulsions at the national, state...

It is getting harder for jobseekers to return to gainful employment and for new entrants to find adequate jobs, says the ILO. THERE is little in the International Labour Organisation's (ILO) annual projection of job growth to cheer about. The year 2012 has been described as a year of stark reality. A third of the global workforce is currently unemployed or poor; that is, 200 million members of the 3.3-billion-strong global...

The much-vaunted NREGA has defaulted on many of its promises “There are many households in our village who have NREGA cards but have not sought work for over two years,” says 32-year-old Umesh Kumar, gram pradhan of Bhainswal village, in Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh. In fact, Kumar recounts having to actually go around persuading people to come for work “whenever we get projects for implementation under NREGA”. This first-time...