Asking questions can cost your life in India - even if the right to solicit information is protected by law. Amar Nath Deo Pandey is luckier - in less than a week, he appears to have escaped two attempts on his life in a nondescript town in India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. More than five years after the introduction of a landmark law that allows Indians to access information held by...

A section of Congress is set to back the demand of chief ministers of BJP and other Opposition-ruled states to reject the Seeds Bill, 2010, in its present form. Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, spearheading the campaign against the bill, has told Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar that the bill, whose avowed purpose is to facilitate production and supply of seeds of quality, will put the peasantry...

The draft bill from the mines ministry that is meant to begin the overhaul of India’s outdated and archaic mining regulations — the Mines and Minerals (Development & Regulation) Bill, 2010 — had already been generally agreed to by the group of ministers scrutinising the legislation. Yet the deputy chairman of the Plan- ning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, has made a telling point or two about a particular provision in the...

The governing body of a United Nations-backed treaty considered vital for the preservation and use of the world’s threatened plant genetic resources met in Bali, Indonesia, today to map out a future course in the face of food insecurity and climate change. The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, adopted at the Conference of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2001 and backed by 127...

World Bank president Robert Zoellick recently listed nine measures that the G20 should adopt under its current French presidency. These range from improving information about grain stocks and developing better weather-forecasting methods to strengthening social safety nets for the poor and helping small farmers benefit from tenders from humanitarian purchasers such as the World Food Programme . These measures tackle only the symptoms of the global food system's weaknesses, leaving the...