Land is contentious. With urbanisation and demand for non-agricultural use, coupled with lack of employment and skills for those in small-holder and subsistence-level agriculture, this is understandable. In western Europe, especially in Britain, and more especially in England, land markets were freed up before the Industrial Revolution and access to education and skills became more broad-based. We haven't introduced reforms that enable people to move out of agriculture, or diversify...

-Reuters   Clad in white home-spun garments and living in a spartan room of his village's Hindu temple, Anna Hazare is an unlikely thorn in the side of the government hundreds of miles away in New Delhi. And yet for millions of Indians, he is a 21st-century Mahatma Gandhi, inspiring a rare wave of protests against the spiralling corruption that has tarnished the up-and-coming image of Asia's third-largest economy. Like Gandhi, who led India's...

The State's public education system faces the threat of dilution from several quarters. WHEN a national law is finally in place to ensure that not a single child is out of school, there is a growing concern in Kerala, which already has a well-established, though languishing, public education system, about the United Democratic Front (UDF) government's moves to sanction a large number of private, unaided schools. The decision to issue no...

  Can we agree in this country on a floor of human dignity below which we will not allow any human being to fall? No child, woman or man in this land will sleep hungry. No person shall be forced to sleep under the open sky. No parent shall send their child out to work instead of to school. And no one shall die because they cannot afford the cost of...

-The Economic Times The Parliamentary Standing Committee on finance has questioned the government's move to introduce a right to food bill when it did not have a single, widely-accepted definition of the poor. The "criteria of identification of the poor remains nebulous," the Yashwant Sinha-headed committee has observed. The proposed food security bill, seen as the largest such legislation anywhere in the world, hinges on the definition of the poor. The...