The total expenditure on central schemes for the poor and on the major subsidies exceeds the states' share of central taxes. These schemes are chronic bad performers due to a culture of immunity in public administration and weakened local governments. Arguing that the poor should be trusted to use these resources better than the state, a radical redirection with substantial direct transfers to individuals and complementary decentralisation to local governments...

-Oxfam Blog As Oxfam’s two week online debate on the future of agriculture gets under way, John Ambler of Oxfam America imagines how it could all turn out right in the end. It is now 2050.  Globally, we are 9 billion strong.  Only 20% of us are directly involved in agriculture, and poor country economies have diversified.  Yet we all have enough food.  Technological innovation has played its part, but increased production...

-The Hindu A recent survey in the Sunderbans region of West Bengal reveals an alarming trend of rising mental health problem among women Everyday, when Badal, a sturdy young man of Sunderbans returns home at dusk, he finds his mother, Kamala, sitting placidly in the verandah, staring into the distance with strangely unseeing eyes. The house, otherwise, is abuzz with activity. His daughter is bringing in the cows, his sons are clamouring...

-NDTV The Supreme Court has been told that the water around the former Union Carbide plant at Bhopal is contaminated and not fit for consumption. The report was filed today by the Indian Institute of Toxicology Research (IITR), Lucknow, which collected 26 samples from around the factory, from where a poisonous gas leak in 1984 led to the deaths of more than 15,000 people, creating the world's largest industrial disaster. The leak...

-Deccan Herald Farmers in Haryana villages have maintained insect equilibrium by pitting beneficial insects against the harmful. In the great Indian epic, Mahabharata, there is a telling story of the valiant Abhimanyu who died fighting while trying to pierce through a Chakravyuah (seven rings). Mahabharata tells us that Abhimanyu had learnt the art of smashing through the seven layers of the human chain of the Chakravyuah. In lot many ways, I find the...