The National Advisory Council (NAC), headed by Sonia Gandhi, on Saturday recommended to the government to grant differential legal entitlement of foodgrains to nearly 800 million people through a reformed PDS network from the next financial year. The NAC also decided to set aside the BPL criteria and suggested two broad categories — priority and general — eligible for legal foodgrain entitlement under the proposed food security law. As per the recommendations,...

Paan kheti [betel vine cultivation] is our lifeline…why does the government want to destroy it and force us into being labourers?” asked Niranjan, a 60-plus-year-old farmer who would lose his betel vines to the Posco steel project in Orissa. This is one of the questions that haunted us,when we, a group of US-based researchers interested in the new economy of globalised India, started looking into the Posco project. We had...

Claims about the benefits of Posco's $12 billion integrated steel project to Orissa's economy and job market come from a study by an “independent” research organisation — but was paid for by Posco itself. In January 2007, the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) published a report on ‘Social Cost Benefit Analysis of the POSCO Steel Project in Orissa,' which claimed that the project would directly and indirectly generate 8.7...

The mammoth Rs 2,162 cr NREGA biometric project that will enable real time data capture of crucial processes such as attendance and measurement for muster roll preparation has finally kicked off with rural development ministry inviting expression of interest from the private sector companies. “The ministry of rural development envisages that the existing processes under NREGA can be digitized through a biometric based ICT solution that can be implemented at the...

The Aadhaar universal ID has been rolled out to general applause and will soon change our lives across the board. The project should accomplish its mission, which is to improve the delivery of rural welfare. It may liberate the poor and marginalised from the cash economy and give them access to formal finance and banking. And if the ID is made mandatory for big transactions, it may reduce money laundering...