India's food inflation nudged up after three successive weeks of decline to 8.74 per cent for the week ended April 9 compared to 8.28 per cent recorded in the previous week as fruits, meat and poultry products became costlier, official data showed on Thursday. Limited data on the wholesale price index released by the commerce and industry ministry also showed a rise in the index for primary articles, from 11.4 per...

As Madhya Pradesh begins to harvest a bumper wheat crop, the state is finding that measures put in place to ensure that the powerful do not game the system are having the unintended effect of keeping out the most marginalised. In anticipation of a bumper harvest, the MP government announced a Rs 100 bonus that it would pay wheat farmers above the central government-fixed Minimum Support Price of Rs 1,120. "It...

In early April, the government was sitting on a pile of 44 mt of wheat and rice, more than double of what is required for maintaining the buffer stock Every three or four years, India witnesses a boom-and-bust cycle in agriculture. In the trough, prices hot up and imports of foodgrains become necessary. At the crest, all that is forgotten, there is talk of exports and life moves on. Any thought...

Climbing food prices across Asia, especially India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Laos, might slow down by at least five years the region’s efforts to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger under the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), a UN ESCAP (Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific) report has cautioned. The report says India is among the mostaffected countries. According to the report, the rising food prices prevented more than 19...

Cash transfer as substitute for state service provision is a dangerous recipe for callously anti-poor and corrupt governance. THE staggering number of recent articles, papers and books on the virtues of giving cash in place of public services to the poor has created an impression that a sort of epidemic has broken out. Economists, policymakers, bureaucrats and newspaper commentators are all infected by it and are in turn infecting others. The central...