This article documents and then examines the various benefits that, it is claimed, will flow from linking the Unique Identity number with the public distribution system and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. It filters the unfounded claims, which arise from a poor understanding of how the PDS and NREGS function, from the genuine ones. On the latter, there are several demanding conditions that need to be met in order...

Pranab Mukherjee, India’s finance minister, put the rural economy at the heart of a national budget on Monday, saying ridding the farm sector of crippling supply bottlenecks would be his “focus” in the coming fiscal year.A market-neutral budget supporting agriculture, welfare schemes and the extension of banking services to more people was designed to dispel any sense that the Congress party-led government was in drift after a series of high...

Ram Dia Singh was ready to chuck in his life as a farmer in northern India to embrace that of an ascetic in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains. When he consulted his guru in the hill town of Solan, instead of being welcomed into a holy order he was instructed to return to the land and do good works among fellow farmers who increasingly struggle to eke out a living...

Larry Summers, the recently departed Chairman of US President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council, posed the following question before his trip to India last November: “What is the self-perception of the Congress as a political party?” In fact, this broad question provokes three specific ones in the domain of Economics. Is the Congress the party of Jagdish Bhagwati or Amartya Sen; Nehru or Indira Gandhi; or Aruna Roy or Nandan...

Fifty million "environmental refugees" will flood into the global north by 2020, fleeing food shortages sparked by climate change, experts warned at a major science conference that ended here Monday. "In 2020, the UN has projected that we will have 50 million environmental refugees," University of California, Los Angeles professor Cristina Tirado said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). "When people are...