-The Indian Express Again, going by NSSO data, while 11.9 per cent of an average Indian agricultural household’s monthly income comes from “farming of animals”, it is well over 24 per cent for Gujarat. Gujarat has a relatively low per agricultural household debt of Rs 38,100, as against the all-India average of Rs 47,000, according to the National Sample Survey Office’s (NSSO) data for 2012-13. Also, 79.2 per cent of the state’s...
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From Plate to Plough: Connecting the drops -Ashok Gulati & Bharat Sharma
-The Indian Express An enduring solution to India’s water woes lies in buffer stocking during monsoon months and release during lean seasons. Till June end this year, the government was worried about how to cope with back-to-back drought. But by the second half of August, the scene changed dramatically and several states were in the spate of floods. In Bihar, more than five million people have been affected and 6,50,000 displaced from...
More »Dark clouds over the PDS -Jean Dreze
-The Hindu The imposition of Aadhaar-based biometric authentication in the Public Distribution System threatens to disrupt recent progress with PDS reforms. It also deprives millions of people of essential food entitlements. India’s Public Distribution System (PDS) has improved steadily during the last 10 years. The system used to be most ineffective and corruption-ridden, with leakages of around 50 per cent at the national level, going up to 80 or 90 per cent...
More »Retaining MGNREGA's core -Brinda Karat
-The Hindu Held to account by the Supreme Court, the Central government is using opaque methods to change the key provisions of the employment guarantee scheme and make it targeted instead of universal. There is a pithy saying in Hindi that the elephant has two sets of teeth, one for show and the other to eat. This seems an apt description of the approach of the Narendra Modi government towards the implementation...
More »Poor forest rights act implementation hampers social justice to the tribals
Access to land and its resources is important since it determines the extent of poverty and deprivation one faces. Historically tribal populations and other traditional forest dwellers did not enjoy any legal entitlement such as ownership rights or user rights of the forest lands where they had been living since ages, both communally and individually. The Forest Rights Act (FRA) is, thus, seen as a progressive legislation that attempted to...
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