The draft of National Food Security Bill has been uploaded on the internet. Congress President Sonia Gandhi's illness had derailed the grand launch of her dream project during the Parliament's monsoon session. The draft appears on the website of the Department of Food and Public Distribution, inviting the public for its comments and suggestions by September end. Gandhi is believed to have pulled up Food Minister KV Thomas for not tabling...

-The Hindu   The Supreme Court on Wednesday directed the Chief Secretaries of all the States to specify how much additional foodgrains were required for them under the Public Distribution System to ensure that there was no starvation death. A Bench of Justices Dalveer Bhandari and Deepak Verma, passing orders on a petition filed by the People's Union for Civil Liberties on streamlining of the PDS, granted two weeks for the States for...

A survey conducted across nine states by the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and Allahabad University suggests that the much maligned system has revived, prodded by politics, good governance and the apex court. It also found the poor to be averse to cash transfers Kotri is a mid-sized village in Desuri block (Pali district, Rajasthan), about 15 kilometres away from the nearest large bus stand and market place. We walked to...

-The Business Standard   Demand-side control cannot be an answer beyond a point to India’s persistently high food price inflation, the World Bank said on Monday. Consumer price-based food inflation in India has been at 10-20 per cent for quite a long while, noted its report on ‘Food inflation in South Asia’. The Bank’s chief economist for the region, Kalpana Kochhar, said controlling inflation in India was a difficult job for the Reserve Bank...

-The Pioneer   Consumers of public distribution system are going to get information while sitting in their homes about availability of ration at the fair price shops of their respective areas. The State Government is set to implement SMS Alert scheme in this connection soon. With this in view, September 22 has been fixed as the last date for giving concrete shape to the tenders of service provider companies. State Civil Supplies Corporation...