The Centre is gearing up to put in place a stringent monitoring system for the Public Distribution System (PDS) even as coining the food security law becomes more complicated and prolonged. Some 11 states gave their suggestions to the Centre on the issue here today at a meeting of state food ministers, in what is seen as a bid by food minister Sharad Pawar to bring PDS back into the...

Some say it is draconian, others want issue settled amicably The exclusion of madrasa education from the ambit of the Right to Education Act, 2009, has split the Muslim community — between those who see the law as “draconian” and “anti-Muslim” and those who want the controversy settled sensibly, without recourse to anger and agitation. The issue came into focus recently with Mahmood Madani of the Jamiat Ulama-e-Hindi describing the Act as...

Since she could remember, labourer Rama Nag (34) didn't know what her ration card meant, that as one of India's nearly 400 million officially poor people, she was entitled to subsidised foodgrain. Until 2006, here in the heart of impoverished tribal India, on the edge of the sprawling forests of Bastar and the Maoist zone of Dantewada, Nag and her family of four survived on rice and whatever they could...

THE government is planning to transfer food entitlements to ration-card holders through an electronic system, once the public distribution system (PDS) is linked to the unique ID, or Aadhar’s central data repository. This would enable state governments to directly tell residents—who will have to have an online account linked to Aadhar—about their entitlements, a discussion paper with the Unique ID Authority points out. Entitlement details would be updated monthly through...

The planned National Food Security Act represents a unique opportunity to achieve gains with respect to the public distribution system. However, the current draft is a non-starter. When I first visited Surguja district in Chhattisgarh nearly 10 years ago, it was one of those areas where the Public Distribution System (PDS) was virtually non-functional. I felt constrained to write, at that time, that “the whole system looks like it has been...