When flames from an open cooking fire raced through Fida Hussein's shack in northern India, it was a disaster for him and his poverty-stricken family. "We have nothing," said Hussein as he stood in the ruins of his hut through which the sky could be seen between the burnt roof timbers in a remote corner of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state. India's number of millionaires grew by 51 percent...

The new formula for the proposed National Food Security Act (NFSA) arrived at by a meeting of the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) on Wednesday has attracted the criticism of activists of the Right to Food Campaign, who say it is full of ambiguities and leaves many issues wide open. They feel NAC should have set a time frame for universalisation of the public distribution system. While the council specified...

The world’s rich countries boosted government support for agriculture in 2009, according to a report that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released last week. The report, “Agricultural Policies in OECD Countries: At a Glance 2010,” is part of the OECD’s annual effort to quantify and assess the support that its 31 developed country members provide to their agricultural producers. The OECD found that the Producer Support Estimate (PSE)...

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Oxford University today launched a new index to measure poverty levels which they said give a “multidimensional” picture of people living in hardship, and could help target development resources more effectively. The new measure, the Multidimensional Poverty Index, or MPI, was developed and applied by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) with UNDP support, the two institutions said in a joint...

A sustainable population stabilisation strategy needs to be embedded in a rights-based and gender-sensitive local community needs-led approach. An authoritarian top-down target approach is not the answer. The evolution of government-led population stabilisation efforts in India goes back to the start of the five year development plans in 1951-52. A national programme was launched, which emphasised ‘family planning' to the extent necessary to reduce birth rates to stabilise the population at...