Kaushik Basu, the current Chief Economic Adviser to the Ministry of Finance, had a 15-year-long stint as Professor of Economics at Cornell University. The Padma Bhushan awardee has been working closely with the Finance Ministry and the Prime Minister to chart the country’s future growth path. He spoke to MANAV CHOPRA about the need for better monitoring to ensure growth doesn’t happen at the expense of social justice. Excerpts: A common...
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Delivering food security
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...
More »Problems of plenty for West Bengal’s potato farmers by Romita Datta
Potato farmers Madhusudan Mondal and Lakshman Adak, in their mid-50s, live 15km apart in West Bengal’s Hooghly district. Both have produced a bumper crop this year, but that has meant different things for Mondal and Adak. Mondal earned around Rs3.5 lakh selling 150 tonnes of potatoes to PepsiCo India Holdings Pvt. Ltd, having signed a contract with the maker of carbonated beverages and Frito-Lay chips to sell his produce to it...
More »Just seven states pay Rs100 under NREGA by Ruhi Tewari
Only seven states pay average wages of Rs100 or more per day to workers under the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s flagship rural welfare programme, despite the Congress party, which heads the government, promising to make Rs100 every worker’s entitlement last year. The UPA had fixed the daily wage of workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA)—which promises at least 100 days of work annually to one...
More »Ration supply to homeless people fixed, SC told by Aanchal Bansal, Krishnadas Rajagopal
Homeless people in Delhi will not have to go hungry anymore. Now, under the Antyodya Anna Yojana (AAY), a homeless household in the Capital will be supplied with 25 kg of wheat, 10 kg of rice, 6 kg of sugar and 22 litres of kerosene oil once it gets an AAY card. The AAY scheme, launched in 2000, intends to provide special food-based assistance to destitute households that are given...
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