The Planning Commission has offered an objective assessment of the unsatisfactory situation as far as Indian agriculture is concerned in its mid-term appraisal of the 11th Five-Year Plan. The commission has done well to remind us that the farm sector is still subject to strangulating controls that dissuade private investment in key areas, including logistics and storage. The government’s agricultural pricing policies, which have rendered minimum support prices (MSPs) the...

A handful of Jarawa tribesmen recently broke into a house in the village of Mathura in the Andaman islands. They left after taking away rice, sugar and coconut. The first people to successfully migrate out of Africa, the Jarawas came to the Andaman islands 60,000 years ago, scientists believe. Essentially hunter-gatherers, the tribespeople have traditionally survived on the raw meat of wild boar. But in the 1970s, a road (the...

The well-intentioned food security Bill, cleared by the empowered group of ministers (EGoM) and now awaiting Cabinet approval, continues to raise issues that have not been fully resolved. Apart from the fact that it falls short of the Congress party’s election promise of guaranteeing nutritional security for the poor, it is still not clear how the government intends to mobilise the food stocks required to implement such a Bill across...

Members of the Right to Food Campaign on Monday “rejected'' the proposed draft of the National Food Security Bill that promises 25 kg. of food grains to each Below Poverty line population family a month at Rs. 3 a kg and urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to come up with a bill that covers every adult resident of the country under the Public Distribution System (PDS). “Nothing short of a universal...

In its visits to about 10 to 12 States across the country so far, the Central Vigilance Committee on Public Distribution System (PDS), constituted under the order of the Supreme Court, has received complaints mainly about improper working of the PDS and diversion of foodgrains into the black market. The committee, under the chairmanship of Justice D.P. Wadhwa, former judge of Supreme Court, conducted a public hearing in Puducherry on Tuesday....