Ensuring food security to all is one of India’s top policy agendas today. Given a large mass of poverty in the country, it is not surprising and no one would perhaps disagree with the need to achieve this as soon as possible. But the varied policy instruments that can be used towards achieving this goal draw sharp differences among the stakeholders. What is food security? The World Food Summit of 1996...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Total Matching Records found : 1620
50 lakh tonnes of grain to be offloaded in domestic market
-The Indian Express Reeling under the pressure of huge foodgrain stocks, well above the storage capacity across the country, the government on Thursday decided to send 50 lakh tonnes of grains to the states at much below the Minimum Support Price (MSP), leaving a window open for export at a later date. “We will look into the issue once the Agriculture Minister is back in town,” Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee is...
More »NAC sticks to its stand, finalises draft food security bill by Nitin Sethi
The Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council stood its ground on Wednesday and gave the go-ahead to an expansive Food Security Bill. Not relenting to the position the Prime Minister's Office and the Planning Commission had taken against a bill that could lead to a surge in subsidy, the NAC finalized the draft along the lines of the framework it had made public earlier. The government was expected to table its...
More »Looking beyond paddy, finally by Sukhdeep Kaur
Punjab's attempts at diversification from water-guzzling paddy hasn’t made much headway. With looming desertification and reverse flow from water-logged blocks having brackish groundwater to areas where the groundwater table is fast depleting, the need to diversify has been underlined since long. Even in a lean monsoon year (2009), there was a record harvest of the crop. Its acreage did not fall even last year when a major part of the paddy...
More »In India's grain bowl, farms face threat from MNREGS
-Reuters Sitting at the edge of fields in the heart of India's grain bowl, Gurdayal Singh Malik shakes his head in resignation about the lack of workers needed for his 60-acre farm, blaming the government's flagship welfare program, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS), for the shortage. Ever since the start of the program, which guarantees 100 days of work a year for rural households, the flow of...
More »
