-The Business Standard   The agriculture minister is right about food security Among the large number of disparagers of the government’s proposed food security law, Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar has been the most relentless, and also among the most outspoken. His latest salvo, expressing misgivings about its smooth implementation without investing more on boosting food production, is as relevant as the objections he had raised earlier concerning its impact on the already fragile...

-PTI Falling prices of vegetables such as potatoes and onions pushed down the food price index by 0.42 per cent in the week ended January 7, over the same period of the previous year. However, experts feel that the decline in prices of food articles will not be enough to prompt the Reserve Bank of India to cut key interest rates at its forthcoming monetary policy review on January 24. Food inflation as...

Agriculture sector undergoes a historic change as livestock surpasses the economy of food grain Policy makers in India are finally acknowledging a structural shift in the agriculture sector they have been noticing for a decade. Economic contribution of livestock is today more than that of food grain crops. Traditionally, of the three components of the sector—crops, livestock and fisheries—crops drove the growth, and food grains are a major part of it....

Centre convenes meeting of State Food Ministers on PDS modernisation A concerted move by the Centre to encourage the States to digitise ration cards has enabled it to weed out 2.96 crore bogus ration cards from the public distribution system. Of an estimated 10.56 crore ration cards, the number of cards has come down to 7.6 crores, Union Minister of States for Food and Consumer Affairs K.V. Thomas told journalists here. Bogus...

To banish hunger and malnutrition from the country, Parliament is likely to pass the National Food Security Bill (NFSB). In our earlier article on this issue, Can we Afford Rs 6-Lakh-Cr Food Subsidy Bill in 3 Yrs? (ET, December 17, 2011), we concentrated on the likely financial implication that we estimated at roughly Rs 6,00,000 crore over a period of three years. In this piece, we address the operational challenges...