To banish hunger and malnutrition from the country, Parliament is likely to pass the National Food Security Bill (NFSB). In our earlier article on this issue, Can we Afford Rs 6-Lakh-Cr Food Subsidy Bill in 3 Yrs? (ET, December 17, 2011), we concentrated on the likely financial implication that we estimated at roughly Rs 6,00,000 crore over a period of three years. In this piece, we address the operational challenges...

Downplaying the impact of Drought in three states on national food production, agriculture and cooperation secretary Prabeer Kumar Basu says the number of people dependent on agriculture has to come down for rural incomes to rise.  "We have sent our team for an assessment of the situation. None of this will affect overall production because it will be compensated by the rest of India where crop conditions are excellent. We will...

Maharashtra teeters on the brink while Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, two key states contributing significantly to grain production, have already declared a Drought, potentially exacerbating agrarian distress and adversely impacting food prices. Supply of pulses, sugarcane, oilseeds, soyabean and coarse grain such as bajra and jowar, is likely to be hit, with production in the rabi season, or the winter harvest, set to decline between 25% and more than 40%, compared...

-PTI   A social audit of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MNREG) programme in Andhra Pradesh has established that a total of Rs 109 crore were “deviated” since it launch. Of the amount, Rs 46.94 crore were found to have been “misappropriated”, according to the state Minister for Rural Development, Dokka Mankiya Varaprasad. “Of the misappropriated sum, we have so far recovered Rs 17.5 crore,” the minister told reporters after releasing the 2012...

Neglected by conventional banks, low-income women in Satara have set one up themselves. Not long after Chetna Gala Sinha came to the Drought-stricken region of Mhaswad in western Maharashtra to marry a farmer and prominent local social activist, she began putting her university degree in finance into action. Local women, she observed, were wearing themselves out in subsistence livelihood such as growing grapes or selling vegetables. In 1992, Chetna, who grew up...