-Down to Earth The most controversial aspect of the food security law is the restructuring of the public distribution system to cover an unprecedented 67 per cent of the population, most of them in the poorer states. LATHA JISHNU, JYOTIKA SOOD and SUCHITRA M explain why there are winners and losers in the new dispensation and how states with better PDS will have to find huge resources to keep their numbers...

-Economic and Political Weekly The government has notified a Draft Land Reforms Policy which, on paper, has all the requisites of an earnest programme. Yet, the near total failure of earlier efforts at land reforms in India leave little room for hope that something substantial will at last be done to combat landlessness. Harsh Mander (manderharsh@gmail.com) is with the Centre for Equity Studies, New Delhi, and works with survivors of mass violence,...

-Down to Earth Our policy makers should move away from the income criterion for estimating poverty and take cognisance of other indicators Amid mounting criticism and heated debates about the poverty line, a challenge has resurfaced to examine whether there could be a single non-monetary criterion of estimating poverty. A poverty line is a monetary cut-off point below which a person is deemed to be poor. Thus, any attempt to measure poverty...

-PTI NEW DELHI: Due to lack of adequate storage infrastructure, fruits, grains and vegetables worth Rs 44,000 crore go waste every year, Food Processing Industries Minister Sharad Pawar informed Rajya Sabha on Friday. Pawar said during Question Hour that the value of annual wastage of fruits and vegetables was estimated at Rs 13,309 crore. However, if the wastage value of rice, wheat, cereals and others are taken into account, it would go...

-The Hindu Is it possible to get a good yield without using chemical fertilizers? Will a shift to organic affect our food security? Can we manage insect pests without using pesticides? Will organic cultivation still be profitable for farmers? These are some of the often asked questions by farmers when problems of modern agriculture are being discussed. Enabavi, a small village in Warangal district, Andhra Pradesh promises to answer all these. Situated off...