-Business Standard While the revised estimates of the gross domestic product (GDP) suggest the Indian economy turned the corner in 2013-14, concerns remain over the durability of this nascent recovery. Particularly worrying is the recent slowdown in rural wage growth, which signals a weakening of rural demand. Growth in rural wages, which had averaged 18 per cent in the previous few years, fell to less than five per cent in September...

-HuffingtonPost.in   Corruption in the Public Distribution System has been cited by the Indian government as the main reason to go for cash transfers to low-income and below-poverty-line families that qualify for receiving them. Such corruption includes siphoning off grains meant for the poor by middlemen and then selling them in the open market to make profit, or higher income families receiving subsidized food through collusion with officials. Both lead to leakages and...

-The Hindu Business Line   A device that literally makes light of the rice parboiling process Bhuvani Devi, a frail-looking woman in her early thirties, has taken up a new challenge - to produce a tonne of parboiled rice in Baarwan village in Jharkhand's Deoghar district. Unlike what the region's paddy farmers did until now, she wants to process and sell parboiled rice rather than paddy itself. "We used to sell paddy at...

-The Hindu Occupational and geographic mobility across the region are bridging income and consumption-related disparities, says the World Bank report, ‘Addressing Inequality in South Asia'. The findings accordingly underscore the role of urbanisation and private sector participation as being critical to mitigating socio-economic disadvantages. Inequality should be understood in terms of monetary and non-monetary dimensions of well-being, contends the report. The share of the poorest 40 per cent of households...

-Livemint.com The abolition of a procurement-based programme would undermine the very raison d'être of FCI rather than bringing about any restructuring The report of the high-level committee on reorienting the role and restructuring of Food Corp. of India (FCI) is a pointer to the government's thinking on matters of agriculture and food security. Among the key recommendations of the committee are: winding up of the activities of FCI in traditional procurement states;...