The state's rice bowl is left empty An unviable minimum support price (MSP) for rice has forced farmers in Andhra Pradesh to leave their lands fallow. The movement is spreading to other states. “Farming never pays” is a familiar slogan among agriculturists across the world, and especially so in India. Nevertheless, many continue to cultivate their fields year after year, barely eking out an existence, toiling in the hope that the tide...

Media Reports The UID Aadhaar project planning and system design shortcomings and security risks at the national (or macro) level have been discussed elsewhere.1 The present article views the Aadhaar project at the system operational level, with practical considerations based on observed and probable functioning at the service delivery end. Consider the following report in a local daily, The Mysore Bugle: Food riots: PDS outlet vandalised Mysore: August 2, 2015—The PDS outlet in Ashokpuram...

-The Telegraph   Chief minister Arjun Munda today slammed the poverty benchmark fixed by the Planning Commission. “The poverty yardstick is faulty and will put a poor state like Jharkhand at a great disadvantage,” the chief minister told The Telegraph. “How can a person survive on Rs 32 daily in urban areas and Rs 26 in rural areas? Munda asked and sought a central review for the sake of the poor. The fear in...

-The Economic Times   More than 25 of the top economists of the country have written an open letter against the Planning Commission poverty line and said that the public distribution system should be universalized. "We do not consider the official national poverty lines set by the Planning Commission, at Rs 32 and Rs 26 per capita per day for urban and rural areas respectively, to be acceptable benchmarks to measure the extent...

In a significant move, prominent economists on Monday made a forceful plea to delink food entitlements from the “faulty” poverty measures put out by the Planning Commission. Asserting that under-nutrition was much more widespread in the country than income poverty “however defined,” the economists sought restoration of the universal Public Distribution System (PDS) “as the best way forward'' in combating hunger and poverty. “This is not only feasible within the available fiscal...