In Maharashtra, where issues hurl themselves at you, the Opposition failed to mount a strong campaign on a single one of them. The front rows of the Mumbai-Nagpur flight are usually the province of the political class: MLAs to MPs, ministers and fixers. This time, though, quite a few of the occupants were celebrities: television and film stars, major and minor, middling and mediocre. It wasn’t the T-20 cricket match in...

South Asia will be badly hit by declining crop yields stemming from climate change, a report by the International Food Policy Research Institute (Ifpri) has found ahead of a food security summit next month. Another study, released by the Food and Agricultural Organization on Thursday, also said that farm yields will be adversely affected by global warming. The Ifpri report—made public on Wednesday—analysed 32 crops and livestock commodities in 281...

Women currently make up around half of the world’s migrant population, even without taking into consideration short-term and seasonal movements. Despite the widespread prevalence of female migration, there are still some common stereotypes about its nature: that it is mostly women and girls accompanying their male heads of household, or dominantly by young, unmarried women, mostly for marriage or for some defined work enabled by contractors. Yet the migration of...

The ongoing floods in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharasthra have pushed millions of rural folks below the poverty line. The tragedy which is far from over has exposed the anomalies in the system of categorization of BPL families as proposed in the concept note of the Food Security Act. More than 200 people have died and over 2.5 million rendered homeless in AP and Karnataka alone. Almost all farmers in...

Academics can have relevance beyond the printed word and Jean Dreze has proved that this is indeed the case. He has deservedly won the Economic Times’ Policy Change Agent of the Year 2009 for his outstanding work in poverty alleviation and rural employment. A development economist, Dreze has taken his academic persuasions to the real world — he not only played a major role in designing the National Rural Employment...