NAC failed to address hunger and malnutrition: Right to Food Campaign Current proposals only offer window-dressing to present Targeted Public Distribution System Arguments suggesting lack of resources cannot be accepted, wrote Campaign members The Right to Food Campaign activists are “extremely disappointed” with the recommendations of the National Advisory Council (NAC) on the proposed Food Security Bill and have said they would continue their struggle for a Comprehensive Food Security Act. Urging the NAC...

In most countries, unemployment is a clean-cut, easily understandable — and identifiable — problem. In India, it’s not that simple. The complexity of our economy, the barbed-wire fence of restrictions that surround our “organised” sector, the tendency towards seasonal work, and the networks of caste, clan and kinship that still govern employment in many parts make answering the simple question “How many of India’s workers are unemployed?” very difficult indeed. The labour ministry...

Bottlenecks at every stage in the implementation of MGNREGA in Atra village in Chhattisgarh are making the villagers disillusioned. “If payment is unreliable, the poorest and the most vulnerable opt out of the system...” On a rainy day in September, Bir Singh Malekar, 45, rues his decision to stay back in Atra village in Chhattisgarh's Rajnandgaon district this summer, instead of leaving in search of work. “I usually go to Chennai between...

Every afternoon at about four, a slight woman named Runi slips out of the cramped, airless room that she shares with her husband and their sixteen children. She skirts the drainage ditch in front of the building, then walks toward the pile of hardened dung cakes that people in this slum on the edge of the northeastern Indian city of Patna use for fuel. Dressed in a bright-yellow sari shot...

Hundreds of Indian workers employed to manually clean non-flush toilets have protested in Delhi against their working conditions. They say that the authorities have failed to act despite declaring such work illegal, and should issue an apology for decades of discrimination. Government figures suggest that about 300,000 low-caste Dalits are still employed in such work. They are estimated on average to earn less than $4 (£2.50) a month. The demonstrators began their protests a...