-Outlook Patna: BJP today asked the Centre to remove "inadequacies" in the ambitious Food bill by increasing its coverage area and fixing all foodgrains at a flat Rs 1 a kg and suggested that it should be modelled after Chhattisgarh food legislation. "The UPA government should remove inadequacies in the Food Bill by extending the benefit to larger section of population," BJP national spokesman Shahnawaz Hussain told reporters. Hailing the success...

-Down to Earth The country's 76 million poor have been denied the right to claim subsidised foodgrain under public distribution system The government has denied 76 million people in the country eligible to access public distribution system (PDS) the benefits of the Food Security system. For the past 20 years, the government has not cared to refresh its data and has been distributing foodgrain according to the population figure of 1991. Worse, the...

-The Economic Times Arvind Panagariya, a professor of Indian economics at Columbia University, hits out at Nobel laureate and Harvard University professor Amartya Sen over his call to confront MPs with the "number of deaths" a delayed Food Security Bill can cause. The former chief economist at the Asian Development Bank counters Sen's argument that it is high social spending that has contributed to the economic growth of Asian economies such...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The UPA is strenuously denying that this campaign is its earthy version of the NDA's "India Shining" campaign, but few are buying the denials. Launched as a "multi-media" campaign to highlight its achievements in two successive terms at the Center, it has been christened by political observers are UPA's " Bharat Smiling" campaign. The spirit of the campaign, says the publicity material given out by the...

-Live Mint Exporting one's way out of the surplus is a losing proposition as global prices have fallen rapidly in the past few weeks India held 77.5 million tonnes (mt) of food stocks in its central pool on 1 May. These stocks had reached a record high of 82.4 mt on 1 June 2012, and that level could be crossed if wheat procurement this May is similar to the procurement a...