The National Food Security Act shall be rolled out starting next financial year spread in phases running up to the parliamentary elections, in what could be an attempt to do the loan-waiver trick in 2014. The government has finalized the bill bringing it substantially closer to the National Advisory Council recommendations. The government has resolved most of the issues that had been in contradiction with the NAC advice and intends to...

It has to be but a means to development, not an end in itself Is India doing marvellously well, or is it failing terribly? Depending on whom you speak to, you could pick up either of those answers with some frequency. One story, very popular among a minority but a large enough group—of Indians who are doing very well (and among the media that cater largely to them)—runs something like...

It is time to separate people's real needs from the arbitrary assessments of poverty that have guided Indian governments India's poverty line has always been a matter of huge debate, but it was a discussion mostly confined to economists and policymakers. But the matter has now gone public, following a row about an affidavit from the planning commission to the supreme court of India, in which the official poverty line was...

-EPW   The media noise shed little light on the important issues involved in deciding the coverage of welfare programmes. The context for the Planning Commission’s (PC) affidavit on the official poverty line was the deliberation in the Supreme Court on how many people could be covered by the public distribution system (PDS). But while the sound and fury over the poverty line – Rs 32 per capita per day in the urban...

-PTI   Union Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh today refuted the charge that National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) had caused labour shortage in sectors like agriculture and construction. Ramesh said that there was a deliberate attempt to spread propaganda discrediting NREGA. "The scheme has increased agricultural wages, reduced distressed migration in some parts of the country and created community assets particularly water conservation structures. Of course, there is room for improvement," the...