INDIA has dropped two places to rank 67th amongst 84 developing nations in the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2010, with alarmingly high levels of hunger, undernourished and stunted children and poorly fed women. It is home to 42 per cent of the world’s underweight children under the age of five, based on data from 2003-2008 in the report released by the Food Policy Institute in Washington...

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which has revitalised the rural landscape across the country, stands diminished in the land of its birth, Rajasthan, hijacked and held to ransom by vested interests and stripped of its backbone of an open social audit. As the Andhra experience has shown, there is one ingredient that can bring back its vitality: institutionalising citizen audits. But, is the Rajasthan government up to...

Trade unions and labour rights activists blame the high suicide rate in Tirupur, Tamil Nadu, on the practices of the garment industry. TIRUPUR has carved out a niche for itself in the world of garments. Its phenomenal growth in the highly competitive global scenario, particularly in the past two decades, has been made possible by the entrepreneurial spirit of its manufacturers and exporters and the sweat and labour of thousands of...

VISHAL, the son of a farm labourer in the west Indian state of Maharashtra, is almost four. He should weigh around 16kg (35lb). But scooping him up from the floor costs his nursery teacher, a frail woman in a faded sari, little effort. She slips Vishal’s scrawny legs through two holes cut in the corners of a cloth sack, which she hooks to a weighing scale. The needle stops at...

With more than 400 million Indians going to bed hungry each day, food security has become a crucial issue. On June 4 last year, the president made an announcement: “My government proposes to enact a new law — the National Food Security Act — that will provide statutory basis for a framework which assures food security for all. Every family below the poverty line in rural as well as urban...