NEW DELHI: Agriculture scientist M.S. Swaminathan on Tuesday came down heavily on proposals to import foodgrains to tide over the shortage due to the poor monsoon this year. He said that if only the government had taken adequate measures to modernise foodgrains storage systems, such an eventuality would not have arisen. “The importers lobby would always be there to make profit out of poverty. But the government needs to take...

The spectre of inflation has returned to haunt India. It is not even six months since the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government returned to power but its inability to control food prices is arguably its single biggest failure till now. The inflation rate will eventually come down sometime in the (hopefully) not-too-distant future and the government will surely take credit for bringing prices down as and when that happens. But...

Academics can have relevance beyond the printed word and Jean Dreze has proved that this is indeed the case. He has deservedly won the Economic Times’ Policy Change Agent of the Year 2009 for his outstanding work in poverty alleviation and rural employment. A development economist, Dreze has taken his academic persuasions to the real world — he not only played a major role in designing the National Rural Employment...

Close on the heels of Congress president Sonia Gandhi exhorting party members to act as “guardians of NREGA” in the August edition of party mouthpiece Congress Sandesh, Rural Development Minister C P Joshi has packed the apex body monitoring the implementation of UPA government’s flagship National Rural Job Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) with his partymen, edging out the original architects of the scheme. The Central Employment Guarantee Council (CEGC), the apex...

Houses in villages are deserted as over 1,50,000 farmers have left in the last one month Chhattarpur (M.P.): Even as the Centre-State political tussle over Bundelkhand goes on, drought-hit Chhattarpur district of the region is on its way to becoming the epicentre of exodus. While farmers have been migrating from the region for the past three years, this year every day thousands of people are making an exodus, induced by...