-The Hindu An odd job that was going to earn her some extra money happened to turn 23-year-old Aarthi Jaiswal into a voice for her neighbourhood in Jahangirpuri here. A few months ago she and a group of her friends were hired for Rs.150 per day to conduct a house-to-house survey asking for people’s opinion on the Delhi Government’s proposal to replace the public distribution system with direct cash transfers into...

-The Times of India Upset with the Delhi government's proposal for doing away with the public distribution system and instead offer cash, the resident welfare association (RWA) of Jahangirpuri and NGOs have decided to hold a meeting with government officials on June 22 at the Jahangirpuri Ramlila ground. In April this year, the government had started its second pilot project in Jahangirpuri area. The project covered 4,000 households, which would be given...

The great poverty debate has been re-ignited, pitting liberal, pro-market economists against left-of-centre economists of the JNU genre. Is the Tendulkar Committee's poverty line - expenditure of 32 a day in urban areas and 26 in rural areas -an affront to the poor, an estimate that could only have been made by a committee whose members had never known a day's poverty themselves? Or is it a realistic estimate of what...

Rural women entrepreneurs in Rajasthan produce a nutritious food supplement as take home rations for pregnant mothers and underfed infants   There is very little that distinguishes the hamlet of Madri from the innumerable others that dot southern Rajasthan. This is a region where the Aravallis make their presence felt in gnarled hillocks, where water is scarce and where the land yields its harvests grudgingly. People here, including toddlers, know well the edge...

An unprecedented economic growth during the last decade has also seen increasing malnutrition, hunger and starvation amongst certain sections of society. India ranks 66 in the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO’s) World Hunger Index of 88 countries (Inter-national Food Policy Research Institute). More than 200 million people in this country are denied the right to food. One-third of all underweight children (57 million) in the world due to lack of...