-The Times of India   The Union Cabinet on Sunday evening approved the National Food Security Bill that will provide rice at Rs 3, wheat at Rs 2 and coarse grains at Re 1 per kg to over half of India's 1.2 billion population. The meeting was held at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's 7, Race Course Road residence. The cabinet on December 13 had deferred a decision on the Food Bill as the...

Six months after she died, police in Bhopal have acted on the death of a two-year-old, malnourished girl. They have booked her parents, charging them with “causing death by negligence”. Activists say that this is perhaps the first instance in India where parents have been blamed for death caused by malnourishment. Adviser to Supreme Court commissioners in the Right to Food case Sachin Jain said the administration always tried to push malnutrition...

The city is estimated to have upwards of 88,000 people living on the streets Each evening this winter, as MPs have debated India's political future, more than 100 people have been gathering at a municipal park behind the Bangla Sahib gurdwara. The area has dozens of groups of protesters who arrive in the city each time Parliament is in session, to make their voices heard. The people in the park, though, aren't...

-The Economic Times Nobel laureate and professor of economics at Harvard University, Amartya Sen believes developed world policies are worsening the global crisis and leaving emerging economies exposed. During an interaction with the press, he also said the recent rupee depreciation needs to be viewed holistically and is not necessarily a 'train crash'. Excerpts: What is your assessment of the current global situation? I think the global situation is pretty bad...

The government believes it is more important to be seen to be doing things than to be doing them well. The proposed food security legislation is another example of this tendency. The legislation exemplifies the self-defeating obduracy of bureaucratic modes of thinking. But the debate around it also exemplifies a failure of intellectual argument in India. Our debates often have this character. First, we spend a lot more time arguing...