India's finance minister announced on Monday a food security bill for 2011/12, a measure that would provide cheap grains for millions of India's poor but which has sparked worries of a huge fiscal cost. It was one of the first signs of populism in the annual budget as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh confronted high prices and corruption scandals as well as elections in five states this year. In his ongoing budget speech,...

Several agri-experts, including noted scientist M S Swaminathan, today said the Budget 2011-12 did not address several important issues facing agriculture, although they welcomed some proposals as being pro-farm. Swaminathan, known as the father of the Green Revolution in India, said the Budget had several good proposals but it did not have a strategy to keep farmers on farm and attract youth in the agriculture sector. "It is unfortunate that in a...

Although finance minister Pranab Mukherjee had promised food security and inclusive growth in his budget speech last year, hunger continues to stalk over 300 million citizens of the country. India slipped to 67th place in the Global Hunger Index 2010 rankings of 122 countries prepared by International Food Policy Research Institute. An Oxford University report said that 410 million Indians live in poverty. While there may be nit-picking over the...

Haryana has distributed Rs 9,834.73 crore from March 2005 to March 2010 to the farmers for the land acquired by Haryana Urban Development Authority (16,362 acre), Haryana State Infrastructure and Industrial Development Corporation (19,868 acre), Public Works Department - Building and Roads (386 acre) and Irrigation department (6,618 acre). Talking to media, Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda said, the average compensation comes to be Rs 22,74,000 per acre that...

With India growing faster than almost every other large economy, the government is right to address its long-run challenges. The push for investment in infrastructure is bearing fruit and the expansion of social programmes such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) and the Right to Education Act (RTE) is spreading the benefits of growth across the population. But just as improved infrastructure doesn’t eliminate all traffic jams, rapid growth...