With the highest child malnutrition rate in the world, Madhya Pradesh needs to revise its food system if things are to be changed for the better. Officially, more than 56 per cent of ration cards are fake in the state, believed to have been issued by low-rank officials to cultivate benefits. The state food and civil supplies department is looking at institutions like GAIN, a Swiss foundation created at a special session...

Officially, more than 56 per cent of ration cards are fake in the state, believed to have been issued by low-rank officials to cultivate benefits. The state food and civil supplies department is looking at institutions like GAIN, a Swiss foundation created at a special session of United Nations General Assembly on Children in 2002, to ensure the supply of nutritious foods to the locals. As a solution to bribery at...

The 2010 Seeds Bill that has been introduced in Parliament does address some of the major concerns in the aborted 2004 version, but strangely a number of important correctives – on regulation, consistency and punishment – that had been incorporated in the 2008 version (which lapsed in 2009) have now been modified or dropped altogether. What forces are pushing the government to act against the interests of India’s farmers? The third...

The NAC suggests steps to ensure food security, but its recommendation for ‘selective universalisation' of the PDS is criticised. INDIA is home to some 230 million undernourished people – that is, 27 per cent of all undernourished people in the world. Worse still, more than half of all child deaths in India are because of malnutrition, and over 1.5 million children in the country are at the risk of being malnourished...

JHABUA, India — Inside the drab district hospital, where dogs patter down the corridors, sniffing for food, Ratan Bhuria’s children are curled together in the malnutrition ward, hovering at the edge of starvation. His daughter, Nani, is 4 and weighs 20 pounds. His son, Jogdiya, is 2 and weighs only eight. Landless and illiterate, drowned by debt, Mr. Bhuria and his ailing children have staggered into the hospital ward after falling...