A significant proportion of the country’s official below poverty line (BPL) population cannot be termed ‘poor’. Fathom this: around a fourth of the 14 million odd BPL households in urban India own a two-wheeler, a third of them a colour TV and almost two-third a pressure cooker. Almost one in five urban BPL households has at least one well-educated, graduate or above, member. The 56 million-strong rural BPL population too exhibits...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Total Matching Records found : 1143
Agri-growth and malnutrition by Ashok Gulati, T Nanda Kumar & Ganga Shreedhar
India has been lauded for its remarkable overall economic growth of over 8% over the last five years. But despite this high and relatively stable growth, India's underbelly is soft. The agriculture sector is performing below expectations, with growth rate of around 2.8%, it is way below the Eleventh Plan target of 4%. The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) estimates that 22% of India's population is undernourished. Child malnutrition is...
More »“Agroecology outperforms large-scale industrial farming for global food security,” says UN expert
“Governments and international agencies urgently need to boost ecological farming techniques to increase food production and save the climate,” said UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, while presenting the findings at an international meeting on agroecology held in Brussels on 21 and 22 June. Along with 25 of the world’s most renowned experts on agroecology, the UN expert urged the international community to re-think current agricultural...
More »India likely to halve poverty rate by 2015: U.N. report by Aarti Dhar
India is expected to reduce its poverty rate from 51 per cent in 1990 to 24 per cent in 2015, slashing the number of extremely poor by 188 million. But progress in the rest of South Asia is not sufficient to halve the level of poverty by that target date, according to a United Nations report on the Millennium Development Goals for 2010. The sharpest reductions worldwide continue to be recorded...
More »Why is feeding the hungry so controversial?
The US Senate is expected to pass the Global Food Security Act, new legislation that would significantly expand the government's commitment to combating hunger worldwide with a broad range of measures and more money, and a special coordinator, or "food czar", to oversee implementation of these provisions across agencies. A proposed new fund would allocate several billion dollars over five years to research and development, to enhance "food security, agriculture productivity,...
More »
