The 'Pradhan Mantri Adarsh Gram Yojana' (PMAGY) was launched in Rajasthan's Sriganganagar District on Friday. Union Minister of Social Justice and Empowerment Mukul Wasnik launched the scheme at Village 18 BB, Block Padampur here. Mukul Wasnik read out the Message sent by Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh on this occasion. In his message, Dr Singh said that the scheme, which aims at the integrated development of one thousand villages where a majority of...

Crops are grown outside our towns. Anger over food prices grows in our towns. Put these two facts together, and you can figure out exactly how divorced, sometimes, the justifiable concern about food inflation is from the cold realities of agriculture. It is not as if we can really blame ourselves for blindness, either; the unreformed, statist nature of price discovery in agriculture insulates us, as in no other sector,...

With the inflation rate of pulses still in double digits for more than a year, the government today said the supply of pulses would remain a critical problem for another two to three years. The government is expecting an increase of two million tonnes (mt) in production of pulses in the current crop year (July 2010-June 2011). “So far as pulses are concerned, it is going to be a critical problem not...

Even as India once more self-declares its “arrival on the world stage” with a symbol for the Indian rupee, a global assessment presents a depressing picture of India’s actual economic performance. In a study whose conclusions were to be expected, the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHDI) has revealed that an appropriate index of poverty (and deprivation) finds its incidence in India and elsewhere to be much greater than...

Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee Tuesday said that the government is committed to enacting the Food Security Act and that the financial implications of this will be known only after the Planning Commission determines the number of families living below the poverty line. He told reporters here that the act had two aspects - one to ensure availability of food to all and another to provide to BPL (below poverty...