This article documents and then examines the various benefits that, it is claimed, will flow from linking the Unique Identity number with the public distribution system and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. It filters the unfounded claims, which arise from a poor understanding of how the PDS and NREGS function, from the genuine ones. On the latter, there are several demanding conditions that need to be met in order...

I remember being disturbed enough to stop watching the 2003 Hindi movie Matrubhumi(motherland). Set in the future, it depicted an Indian village populated only by men. It gets that way after a man, yearning for a boy, publicly drowns his newborn girl in a VAT of milk, sparking a custom that wipes out women. So the men watch porn, fornicate with farm animals. A father marries his five sons to...

The US government was advised by its officials to start a military-style trade war against European countries that oppose GM crop cultiVATion, a new Wikileak release by the UK-based newspaper Guardian has shown. The US embassy in Paris in 2007, when France moved to ban GM corn by Monsanto, recommended that the US "calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility,...

Distressed over the crop losses in the recent rains, seven more farmers died of shock in the state in the last 24 hours. While three farmers died in Guntur district, West Godavari, Krishna, Prakasam and Nalgonda districts accounted one death each. Thota Apparao died of shock at Rentapadu in Sattenpalle mandal, while Mukteshwar Rao died of cardiac arrest at Attota in Kollipara in Guntur. Hanumantha Rao collapsed in his field on...

Sitting on a huge debt burden of close to Rs 2 lakh crore, West Bengal government's finances are the worst among five highly-indebted states in the country, a noted economist attached with the Indian Statistical Institute here has said. "Revenue deficit of the state is the highest among the five highly-indebted states of UP, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat," Abhirup Sarkar, the economist, told PTI. He said that for the...