A government report lends credence to the notion of “two Indias”, or the distinction between “India” and “Bharat” – a theme often debated in recent years. At a time when urban India is growing and policy makers have expressed clear preference for the trend, this report, by National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), brings India’s deep urban-rural divide into focus, showing disparities in scale and levels of expenditure and consumption and, equally...

-The United Nations Sustainable development will not be achieved unless hunger and malnutrition are eradicated, the United Nations food agency warned today in a new report. “We cannot call development sustainable while this situation persists, while nearly one out of every seven men, women and children are left behind, victims of undernourishment,” said the Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), José Graziano da Silva, in a news release. In the report...

Lack of knowledge, fear of political criticism are some of the reasons that are stopping FCI, according to experts What is stopping Food Corp. of India Ltd (FCI) from selling its ample wheat stocks in the open market and buying futures contracts to meet its distribution commitments in the months ahead? Or, for that matter, what is keeping the food procurement agency from selling grain futures internationally, knowing that a bumper crop...

Political parties across the spectrum get into a tangle over an innocuous cartoon in a school textbook THE textbooks of the National Council of Educational Research and TraiNINg (NCERT) are in the news again. This time, it is not history but political science textbooks that managed to get almost all Members of Parliament on their feet on an emotive issue and for reasons that defied logic. One day before the 60th...

The global economic slowdown may pinch the poor in India. The PlanNINg Commission is redrawing its projections for the 12th five year plan (2012-17) in wake of current global economic situation and could end up scaling down money for welfare schemes. Health, education and rural development are not expected to get the hike they had sought and allocations for some other ministries are likely to fall, prompted by a lower growth. The...