The government’s effort to draft a seminal law to fight hunger is flawed, inadequate, opaque and “not in the spirit of the election promises” in the Congress manifesto, says a confidential note circulated to top ministers at a late-evening meeting on Monday. The three-page note—a copy of which is with the Hindustan Times—came from the office of finance minister Pranab Mukherjee and was handed to the select empowered group of ministers...

A nation where hungry children are forced to eat mud has no right to call itself a superpower or a civilised nation. What makes such reports frustrating for someone like me, who has been feeding poor children for the past one decade, is that reaching food to hungry children is not complicated or costly. It costs very little to give a child the required amount of calories and supplements she...

Asha, a Rag picker holds out a roti with salt and says, "Most days we eat only this. Rice is Rs 20 a kilo. We can't afford two rice meals a day." "It pains to see my family go hungry. But what can you do with Rs. 100 income a day?", adds rickshaw puller, Mohammad Zafar.  Zaffar and Asha are homeless who earn about Rs 100 a day for their...

The government has sought more time to work on the food security bill after Congress chief Sonia Gandhi insisted on a comprehensive legislation to tackle the problem of hunger among India’s poor. An empowered group of ministers had cleared the draft bill last month but reviewed it tonight at Sonia’s insistence and sought more time for deeper study. After the 90-minute meeting of the group, food and agriculture minister Sharad Pawar...

This has to be the ultimate irony. Barely a few weeks after a Supreme Court committee comes out with a verdict that the public distribution system is bust and needs a drastic overhaul, the government clears a food security bill that seeks to push more food through this very same burst pipe. If newspaper reports are to be believed, the Congress president is not happy with even this and wants...