In Chhattisgarh, people swear by the PDS, which has witnessed a revival since 2004 when the government revamped it. IN Chhattisgarh, as part of the survey on public distribution system (PDS) versus cash transfers, a team of student volunteers visited 12 villages spread across Mahasamund and Sarguja districts. The State may have been in the news for all the wrong reasons in recent times, but the way its PDS worked...

In Bihar, the coupon system to distribute PDS grain fails to prevent corruption. AT the Jamaluddin gram panchayat in Patna district on January 26, 2007, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar launched an ambitious reform of the public distribution system (PDS) in Bihar: a coupon system. He claimed that it would “empower the poor and stop black-marketeering” and that it was “not a simple coupon but a powerful weapon in the hands...

A survey in nine States shows that they have quietly revived and expanded their public distribution system. AT a time when the Union Cabinet cleared the draft of the national food security Bill after dilly-dallying over it comes a compelling piece of information: many State governments have quietly revived and expanded the public distribution system in their States. That, at any rate, is one of the main findings of a...

Union Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh, in an article on left-wing extremism (“From Tirupati to Pashupati?” The Hindu , October 14, 2011), observed candidly: “It is not the naxals who have created the ground conditions ripe for their ideology — it is the singular failure of successive governments both in the States and the Centre.” There lay the main cause of the festering sore of naxalism, often characterised as left-wing...

It began as an expose: the story of how Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh’s relatives allegedly received illegal mining contracts in Madhya Pradesh. Then, a tale of arm-twisting: government officials forced cable operators to pull out the news channel, Etv MP, that aired the story. Now, the story has a twist: Allegations of a failed “paid-news” deal. Officials claim that the channel carried the report—which Singh claims is baseless—after the government...