NAC’s retrograde proposals fall short of creating a meaningful vision of food entitlement in the country The National Advisory Council (NAC) has finally come out with its proposals for the National Food Security Act. After months of deliberations within itself and with various government departments, the proposals will form the basis of the Act to be introduced in Parliament. However, a quick perusal of the proposals suggests that not only has NAC...

It is imperative that the committee constituted to look into charges of corruption in the Commonwealth Games should also include violations of labour laws within its purview. One of the more blatant and visible scams of the recently concluded Commonwealth Games relates to how the thousands of workers who worked on the games construction sites were denied minimum wages, safety equipment, housing and other benefits constitutionally due to them. In an interview...

After the visually-challenged RTI activist Ratna Ala, another RTI crusader from Valsad, Ketan Shah has lodged a complaint stating that he has been threatened for his activism by the chief officer of Valsad nagarpalika and senior officers in the district administration. For Shah, major shock came after the nagarpalika passed a resolution — a copy is with TOI — in the general body meeting on October 19 to blacklist him and...

Delhi farmers on Sunday demanded that there should be a provision for a judicial review of cases in which government acquired land for public purposes but later sold them at the market price to private firms. Representatives from different villages of rural Delhi made this demand at a mahapanchayat held in Mahipalpur, one of the capital's oldest villages. The farmers had gathered to protest against the "archaic" Land Acquisition and...

The National Advisory Council, headed by Congress President Sonia Gandhi, on Saturday settled for a much less ambitious National Food Security Act than it had previously agreed to. Scaling down its recommendations, it decided to recommend subsidised foodgrains for 46% of the rural Indian population and 28% of the urban population. The pruning of the recommendation had an immediate fallout, with the NAC member Jean Dreaze, face of the right-to-food security campaign,...