Earlier this week, India's opposition parties came together in a rare show of unity to take to the streets in cities across the country. They protested against the government's recent decision to raise fuel prices after it scrapped its subsidy of petrol prices in an effort to cut the budget deficit. Supporters of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party joined hands with their ideological rivals among the Communists to paralyse normal life in...

THE government is planning to transfer food entitlements to ration-card holders through an electronic system, once the public distribution system (PDS) is linked to the unique ID, or Aadhar’s central data repository. This would enable state governments to directly tell residents—who will have to have an online account linked to Aadhar—about their entitlements, a discussion paper with the Unique ID Authority points out. Entitlement details would be updated monthly through...

A demand to reintroduce a universal Public Distribution System (PDS) in the country appears every now and then. Its proponents argue that universal access is necessary for ensuring food security, for better control on prices and for eliminating (at least partially) the evils of exclusion errors in the targeted PDS. The question is: what are the operational implications of access for all citizens to subsidised foodgrain? They are currently allocated as...

The Asia-Pacific region – home to two-thirds of the world’s one billion malnourished people – must see growth in agricultural investment to tackle the hunger challenge, a senior United Nations official stressed today. The number of hungry people in Asia and the Pacific climbed by more than 60 million in 2009 to 642 million, Jacques Diouf, Director-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), said in a video message...

The recent spike in world food prices has further widened the gap between the developed and the developing economies. While, over 70 per cent of the world's population resides in poor countries, it has access to less than 40 per cent of the world's resources such as water, irrigated land, power, etc. This is a result of inconsistent economic progress (post-colonialisation birth pangs), rampant population growth and distractions such as...