A lot has been said and written about the visit of Barack Obama, the President of USA to India. The corporate media was in the usual over-enthusiastic drive to bring to its readers and viewers all minute details about his visit from where he stayed and what he ate to how many warships, planes and cars accompanied him and how a whopping $200 million was spent per day for the...

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...

3,344 acres of barren land to be converted into farmland An agriculture development scheme under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGP) is being launched in 154 of the 187 tribal hamlets in the Attappady Hills in Palakkad. As much as 3,344 acres of barren land will be converted into farmland under 10,405 works with the implementation of the Rs.64-crore scheme, considered a first of its kind. The salient...

NAC’s retrograde proposals fall short of creating a meaningful vision of food entitlement in the country The National Advisory Council (NAC) has finally come out with its proposals for the National Food Security Act. After months of deliberations within itself and with various government departments, the proposals will form the basis of the Act to be introduced in Parliament. However, a quick perusal of the proposals suggests that not only has NAC...

According to the National Bank of Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) data on loans given out by nationalised and cooperative banks, there are more farmers doing agriculture in Delhi than Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka and West Bengal. The farmers in Delhi were allotted loan of Rs 22,077 crore in 2009 alone at mere 5% rate of interest, which is the second highest after agriculture-rich Punjab. Delhi’s loan disbursal amount is bizarre,...