-Outlook As the Manmohan Singh government makes evident its unfriendliness to villages, the nation hurtles towards disaster. It's a danger no one wants to face. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been trying for years to make us believe that agriculture is a vast marshland in which a huge population is stuck ankle- to neck-deep and it is his duty to rescue them. "Our salvation lies in moving people out of agriculture," he...
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Social Protection Can Help Overcome Poverty and Hunger -Jomo Kwame Sundaram
-IPS News ROME: The growing consensus, momentum and commitment to eradicate world hunger may seem overly ambitious in view of the slow progress in reducing the number of hungry people in the world in recent decades. After all, declining food prices in the second half of the 20th century, thanks to increasing production, were not enough to eliminate poverty and hunger in the world. In the 1960s and 1970s, many governments invested a...
More »Six people who pulled strategic levers to open up political parties' finances -Soma Banerjee
-The Economic Times If India is now debating opening the books and operations of political parties to the public, it's because of these six people who pulled strategic levers and applied relentless pressure. Soma Banerjee traces a four-year effort that converted intent to action Balwant Singh Khera, a politician from Hoshiarpur in Punjab, is not a name that will strike a chord in mainstream politics or social discourse today. It might in...
More »For more aware citizens, more accountable parties -Shailesh Gandhi
-The Indian Express Should political parties be brought under the RTI? Two former central information commissioners debate On reading The Indian Express editorial ('Party police', June 5) and Pratap Bhanu Mehta's article ('Party fixing', IE, June 6) about the CIC order declaring that six political parties are public authorities, I felt they had missed a crucial point. The decision of the commission has been based on the RTI Act. The act states...
More »What we need is not a food security Bill but a hunger elimination Act -Arvind Virmani
-The Times of India In the decade or so that i was at the Planning Commission, i always had advisory responsibility for the food ministry/public distribution system, among other issues of development policy. It did not take very long to find out that the fundamental problem with the system was about so-called "leakages" abetted by corruption: One soon learnt that the Food Corporation of India (FCI) was one of the most...
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