-Live Mint All file notings can be made public now except those explicitly exempted The Union cabinet on Thursday decided to withdraw controversial draft amendments to the Right to Information (RTI) Act that sought to restrict disclosure of government file notings. The move allayed the concerns of rights activists. The draft amendments would have restricted disclosure of file notings only to social and developmental issues. The government had to drop the move following...
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No move to dismantle PDS: Montek Singh Ahluwalia
-PTI Pitching for direct cash transfer of food subsidy, Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia on Tuesday assured this would not result in dismantling of current system of procuring grains at minimum support price (MSP) and distribution through PDS. "...about the cash transfer (of subsidy), the accusation is that you want to dismantle the PDS. This is completely wrong because there is no question of dismantling the minimum support prices," Ahluwalia...
More »Like US, agriculture ministry needs a wing to collate dependable farm data-Tejinder Narang
-The Economic Times The fear of drought in India has abated with late precipitation of the monsoon in September this year. However, the country continues to suffer from a drought of formalised tabulated data of agro items on a real-time or monthly basis, though many estimates continue to fatigue the print and electronic media. Red or green prices flashing on computer screens are taken for 'granted', but the discovery of future or...
More »Empty Promise -George Monbiot
-Outlook Could scientists have got the impacts of climate change on food supply wildly wrong? I believe we might have made a mistake: a mistake whose consequences, if I am right, would be hard to overstate. I think the forecasts for world food production could be entirely wrong. Food prices are rising again, partly because of the damage done to crops in the northern hemisphere by ferocious weather. In the US, Russia...
More »Govt to switch to cash transfers to deal with an unwieldy subsidy bill -Siddharth & Surojit Gupta
-The Times of India The government is set to step up its push for cash transfer of subsidies and adopt it as a policy doctrine in the run-up to elections, with two pilot projects validating the assumption that it would lead to significant savings for the government while enhancing benefits for users. A pilot project for cooking gas in Mysore run by state-run oil companies saw the number of connections dropping 40%...
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