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...
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In defence of PDS
The central vigilance committee led by retired Justice D. P. Wadhwa, which was established by the Supreme Court of India to monitor its orders in the PIL on the right to food, has come out with a strong indictment of the public distribution system (PDS). Based on State-level reports for Delhi, Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Karnataka, the committee has identified widespread corruption at different levels of the...
More »EGoM likely to clear draft food security Bill tomorrow
An empowered ministers' panel meeting tomorrow is likely to take some decisions to tackle price rise and finalise the draft Food Security Bill, which seeks to give the poor the right to get rice and wheat at Rs 3 per kg. The empowered group of ministers, headed by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, is scheduled to review the minimum export price (MEP) for Basmati. In the face of high Food Inflation, the...
More »Guaranteeing unemployment
It is true that, at 119 crore person-days, the employment created this year by the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS), the government’s flagship programme, is tiny, a fraction of one percentage point of the total employment in the country. But a more meaningful way of looking at its potential impact, however, is to see that around half the country’s workforce has registered for a job under it...
More »Government-led inflation
Food Inflation remains extraordinarily high at 17.79%. The government emphasises supply problems caused by last year’s drought, But a bigger and less reversible problem is government-led inflation through big increases in the Minimum Support Prices (MSP). The MSP for wheat and paddy rose only modestly between 2002-03 and 2005-06 , from Rs 620 to Rs 650/ quintal and from Rs 530 to Rs 570/quintal respecticely. But after that the MSP shot...
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