The report of the Rangarajan Committee scrutinizing proposals of the National Advisory Council for the National Food Security Bill makes for a very instructive read. It's official now: UPA II is on a death wish, and it could not have been articulated better. The alacrity with which the prime minister set up this committee (remember, he could not find time in three years to convene the nutrition council he chairs)...

The class bias in government policy is clear in the decision to release a small amount of foodgrain in the open market to tackle inflation. MOST people would agree that there is a strong element of speculation underlying the current inflation and that forward trading contributes to it. Yet the government, though it has banned forward trading in certain commodities under public pressure, is curiously reluctant to see this point....

So why is the UPA hell-bent on killing its unique success story: the NREGA? Here's the inside narrative of the conspiracy. It took 47 days of a protest sit-in at Jaipur to make the state budge(1). It's notable that the objective of this protracted protest was not to coerce the Rajasthan government for an extra share of the state's resources, but to hold the government accountable to the Constitution and its...

The National Advisory Council's recommendations on the National Food Security Bill are in danger of being brushed aside. It is the fate of most advisory committees that the government accepts whatever advice suits its purposes and ignores the rest. The first version of the National Advisory Council (NAC-1) managed to avoid that fate to some extent, due to favourable circumstances. NAC-1 was able to persuade the government to enact the...

THE issue of foodgrain management policy has assumed renewed importance with several reports in the media of large-scale wastage and diversion from the public distribution system (PDS). In a cogently-argued paper recently, Prof Kaushik Basu, a well-known economist and the chief economic adviser in the ministry of finance, has argued for foodgrain to be released in lots of much smaller size into the market, than is presently done by the...