The June 1 announcement by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, while releasing the Report Card for the first year of the second term of the United Progressive Alliance Government, that the Food Security Bill was under preparation and that the Bill would be placed in the public domain for scrutiny and wider consultation has raised hopes about early enactment of the law to ensure the people's right to food as part...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Total Matching Records found : 1151
NAC Chief Sonia scores on Food Bill by AM Jigeesh
THE NATIONAL Advisory Council ( NAC) headed by UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi has scored its first victory — a change in the proposed Food Security Bill that raises the monthly allocation of foodgrains to the poor from 25 kg to 35 kg at Rs 3 a kilo. The draft Bill, approved by the empowered group of ministers ( EGoM) recently, had offered 25 kg of foodgrains to those below the poverty...
More »Memories at public expense by Ramachandra Guha
Judging by the television news that night, May 20, 2010, was a day like any other — marked by natural disaster (a cyclone predicted for Orissa), violent rebellion (the blowing up of railway tracks by Maoists in Bihar), political partisanship (the insistence by Mamata Banerjee that the Union railways minister would be of her party even if she soon moved, as she hoped, to become chief minister of West Bengal),...
More »India’s blank spaces by Samar Halarnkar
‘Beggar type.’ Like most of us, Smita Jacob had never come across that pithy official phrase before. It’s a classification in the records of the police of New Delhi, India’s richest city, used to describe a dead homeless person whose death is too insignificant to investigate. The police are as sensitive as you and I to the cripple on the pavement, the child at the car window. They mean no...
More »Stage set for rural BPL survey by Ravish Tiwari
With the proposed food security law likely to get a momentum after the formal constitution of the National Advisory Council (NAC), under the chairmanship of Congress president Sonia Gandhi, the Rural Development Ministry has also decided to speed up the process for identification of rural below poverty line (BPL) families. In this context, the ministry has decided to conduct pilot studies across the country for fine tuning the parameters required...
More »
