“The hungry must not be left out” The steering group of the Right to Food Campaign on Saturday expressed its apprehension about doing away with the distribution of subsidised foodgrains to Above Poverty line (APL) beneficiaries under the Public Distribution System (PDS), as suggested by the Supreme Court. While welcoming the court's order on rotting foodgrains, the campaign, that is pressing for universal PDS, has said that leaving out APL would mean...

The planned National Food Security Act represents a unique opportunity to achieve gains with respect to the public distribution system. However, the current draft is a non-starter. When I first visited Surguja district in Chhattisgarh nearly 10 years ago, it was one of those areas where the Public Distribution System (PDS) was virtually non-functional. I felt constrained to write, at that time, that “the whole system looks like it has been...

The UN has said what the Congress had been bragging all the time. The international agency has hailed India’s rural job guarantee scheme, one of the flagship programmes of the UPA government, saying that it has reduced poverty and reversed inequality. The UN Development Programme (UNDP) in a report titled “What Will it Take to Achieve Millennium Development Goals? An International Assessment,” says the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme has...

Development models that focus attention on the poor while expanding job opportunities, increased government spending on social services and aid flows from affluent nations are all successful strategies for alleviating global poverty, the United Nations says. Access to low carbon energy and mobilizing domestic capital by, for example, improving tax collection, are the other factors the UN Development Programme (UNDP) identifies in a new report as crucial factors for the...

The latest report on the progress of millennium development goals (MDG) by the United Nations has said that robust social protection and employment schemes such as India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) reduce poverty and reverse inequality. In its report, ‘What Will it Take to Achieve Millennium Development Goals,' the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has said the MNREGS is known for improving livelihoods through legal guarantee of...