The planned National Food Security Act represents a unique opportunity to achieve gains with respect to the public distribution system. However, the current draft is a non-starter. When I first visited Surguja district in Chhattisgarh nearly 10 years ago, it was one of those areas where the Public Distribution System (PDS) was virtually non-functional. I felt constrained to write, at that time, that “the whole system looks like it has been...

The Asia-Pacific region – home to two-thirds of the world’s one billion malnourished people – must see growth in agricultural investment to tackle the Hunger challenge, a senior United Nations official stressed today. The number of hungry people in Asia and the Pacific climbed by more than 60 million in 2009 to 642 million, Jacques Diouf, Director-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), said in a video message...

Wrong policies of the government have been responsible for the prevalent food insecurity in the country, alleged activists. They also said the proposed National Food Security Act ignores the root causes of Hunger and it deliberately leaves untouched the structural roots of the malnutrition crisis. Releasing a report on India’s food security scenario and the reasons behind it on Tuesday activist Vandana Shiva said following Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings on self-reliance together...

Young rag-pickers sifting through rubbish are a common image of India’s chronic poverty, but destitute children face new hazards picking apart old computers as part of the growing “e-waste” industry. Asif, aged seven, spends his days dismantling electronic equipment in a tiny, dimly-lit unit in east Delhi along with six other boys. “My work is to pick out these small black boxes,” he said, fingers deftly prising out integrated circuits from the...

The UN has said what the Congress had been bragging all the time. The international agency has hailed India’s rural job guarantee scheme, one of the flagship programmes of the UPA government, saying that it has reduced poverty and reversed inequality. The UN Development Programme (UNDP) in a report titled “What Will it Take to Achieve Millennium Development Goals? An International Assessment,” says the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme has...