As to who should conduct the survey to identify the ‘priority' and ‘general' categories of households as recommended by the National Advisory Council (NAC) was an issue that the expert panel headed by chairman of the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council, C. Rangarajan, grappled with in its meeting here on Tuesday.The NAC has recommended that legal entitlements to subsidised foodgrains be extended to at least 75 per cent of the...

The district supply office department will go online with the data on inflow of grains and available stocks in city fair price shops. The new system, brought in as part of modernisation of the public distribution system, is expected to put up the data by December 20.“We will put up the entire data online on www.mahafdopune.in, and this will enable citizens to check on the available stocks; this will ensure...

The papers in this volume, as indicated in the preface, are not envisaged to be mere academic exercises; they are intended to provide the basis for informed discussions among key stakeholders and with policymakers involved in the areas related to agriculture, food security and rural development in India. If achieving self-sufficiency in food is the primary goal of agriculture policy, poverty alleviation is the second. As has been pointed out,...

Principal Advisor to Planning Commission Pronab Sen, who is heading a committee on wages, has said states are bound to pay prevailing minimum wages to workers under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. His view contradicts the stand taken by the rural development ministry, which had said that NREGA exempts itself from other laws including the Minimum Wages Act and hence the Centre is not obliged to reimburse states according to...

Accelerating the process of framing a National Food Security Bill, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday convened a high-level meeting with his senior Cabinet colleagues to discuss aspects of the Bill and the recommendations made by the National Advisory Council (NAC).At the centre of the discussions was a letter written by NAC chairperson Sonia Gandhi to the Prime Minister on merging the Rural Development Ministry's exercise for identification of the...