-The Hindustan Times The passage of the National Food Security Act (NFSA) made 2013 a landmark year for the right to food in India. It was a small but significant step in the battle against hunger. If the year was witness to the emergence of a political consensus, nationally, on the right to food, the next year will need to be characterised more by action and not just intent. The principal challenge in...

-The Indian Express India faces no risk of violating its commitments under WTO The Indian delegation, led by commerce minister Anand Sharma, is approaching the WTO Ministerial in Bali with a ‘begging bowl'. The government has agreed to the so-called ‘peace clause'-a euphemism for not taking any penal action for violating commitments under Agreement on Agriculture (AoA)-proposed by WTO Director General but with the caveat that this will remain in place until...

-Newsclick.in Caste discrimination percolates down to the food plates for Musahar community in Madhepura district of Bihar reports Neha Dixit "The mahant of the Shankar Math told me to stay away from ultra-Left people the day I questioned the Collector about the hunger deaths in my village," recounts Prabhansh Manjhi. Prabhansh is from the Musahaar community in Madhepura district of Bihar. Estimated to be 2.3 million in the country, they are Mahadalits, one...

-India Today   The UPA government and the Congress leadership might be patting themselves on the back talking big about the recently passed Food Security Bill, but their promises look far from delivery given the existing state of Public Distribution System (PDS). In a sting operation carried out by Headlines Today special investigation team, hidden cameras caught the pilferage of grain meant for distribution among the national capital's poor people under the PDS....

-The Hindu The role of education in reducing poverty is widely recognised but our planners are yet to realise how the impoverished struggle with a learning process that is unresponsive to their needs In a society where poverty is far more common than prosperity, one would expect the implications of poverty for education to be widely recognised. What we find, instead, is that poverty is seldom mentioned directly in policy documents on...