-The Telegraph Around 30 economists, including former NAC member Jean Dreze, today urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to do away with categorisation of beneficiaries under the proposed national food security bill. Dreze, who was part of the Sonia Gandhi-headed council, and the others have written to Singh saying the bill has “serious shortcomings” that needed to be removed. The bill, pending in Parliament, provides for subsidised grain for up to 75 per cent...

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh can be devastatingly polite: when Bharatiya Janata Party president Nitin Gadkari, who has a commercial interest in agriculture, wrote him a doomsday letter on the dire state of agriculture under UPA rule, Dr. Singh took a month to reply, but when he did, it was to tell the BJP president in excruciating detail about the rise in agricultural production during his tenure in office, which compares...

In 1953, the authors of India's first-ever crime survey presented a grim picture of the state of the new country's police forces. “There has been,” authors of Crime in Indiareported, “no improvement in the methods of investigation or in the application of science to this work. No facilities exist in any of the rural police stations and even in most of the urban police stations for scientific investigation.” From the National Crime...

-The United Nations Globalized food systems and the spread of Western lifestyles has spawned an international public health disaster with over a billion people suffering from undernourishment while another billion remain overweight or obese, an independent United Nations expert warned today. “Our food systems create sick people,” said Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, as he presented his latest report to the UN Human Rights Council...

-The Hindustan Times    Poor households of urban India are emerging hotspots for hunger and ill-health and children there live in worse conditions than in rural areas, says a new UN report released on Wednesday.   The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) report -- state of the world’s children 2012 -- say that like most parts of the world, children living in around 49,000 slums in India are "invisible". Half of these slums are in...