Food prices are rising at a rate that neither consumers nor politicians can afford. On this, there is consensus. But on the more substantive question as to what should be done about it, there is more silence than disagreement. The Opposition wants to blame the government, the government wants to shift the blame to the states. But ultimately, there is only so much that food management can do when there...

Unprecedented rise in potato prices pushes up inflation  Food inflation soared to 15.58 per cent for the week ended November 14 in the wake of an unprecedented rise in the prices of potato and other essential items. Official data based on the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) released here on Thursday for the week revealed that while potato prices have more than doubled in the past 12 months, other basic food...

The rural population is at present estimated at 85 crores. Ten per cent of the households are completely landless. Another 52 per cent have holdings of less than 0.2 hectare. The per capita agricultural land in the rural areas has come down to 0.12 hectare. According to the National Sample Survey, the annual income of an agricultural household from farming is less than Rs 12,000 and from all sources it...

The bizarre politics behind the UPA's withdrawal of the controversial sugarcane price order. It was the quickest retreat that any government has made in recent times. It took just a day’s protest outside Parliament before the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government decided to withdraw the controversial provisions of a notification it had issued last month on the payment of fair and remunerative prices to sugarcane farmers. You may describe it as an...

Without urgent progress which will stimulate funding for renewables, nations could be locked into high-carbon energy and transport technologies for decades, inflating another unsustainable economic bubble, say experts. Achim Steiner, the head of the U.N. environment programme, said: “Far more worrying [than formally ratifying a treaty] is that every month we delay we send a ambiguous signal into the world economy, the markets, investors and R&D.” The markets had not...