-Livemint.com Government set to fight to remove curbs on future food programmes while negotiating a permanent solution at WTO New Delhi: Emboldened by its success in making the interim solution on food stockholding under the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO) open ended, India will put forth a proposal to do away with the restrictions imposed on a country's food programme under the Bali agreement. Strict disclosure norms and the provision that a...

-Livemint The development economist on the Modi government's initiatives and his stand on them, and MGNREGS The Narendra Modi-led government should consider replacing inefficient subsidies with a basic monthly income for all citizens, says Pranab Bardhan , emeritus professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley. Bardhan, who recently sparred with economists Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya in a debate over the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS),...

-The New York Times NEW HAVEN, Conn. - Last month, the United States and India announced an important breakthrough concerning India's "right-to-food" program. The Indian government subsidizes food for its poorest citizens through a system of price supports and public stockpiling. The program is critical to India's future: According to Unicef, one in three of the world's malnourished children lives in India. But as India's policy has expanded, it has come into...

-Down to Earth Government sidelines its committee of experts to set up new panel to review India's intellectual property rights policy The politics of protecting intellectual property rights (IPR) is becoming more curiouswith the commerce ministry setting up a think tank to draft a national IPR policy while sidelining a committee of experts it had set up earlier. Annoyed academics who were asked to help formulate the policy in July this year...

-Livemint It is early days yet to claim victory in the larger struggle to correct the fundamental bias in WTO against developing countries The impasse regarding the implementation of the trade facilitation agreement (TFA) in the World Trade Organization (WTO) seems to be coming to an end after India and the US reportedly resolved their differences on the food security outcome of the Bali ministerial conference held last December. Apparently, the US...