Some people feel agriculture in India provides employment much beyond its capacity — that is, the number of people working on the farm is many times the actual requirement. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is among the proponents of this view. In his interaction with a group of editors last month, Singh said, “The only way we can raise our heads above poverty is for more people to be taken out of...

Twenty years is a good enough time to assess how countries of the world, irrespective of the economic or political system they follow, have performed in promoting human development. Successive Human Development Reports (HDR), since 1990, have mainstreamed health and education as critical indicators of human progress and contributed to international policy structures. For instance, the Millennium Development Goals, aimed at using international financial resources to reduce global poverty, can...

The food distribution agencies of states across India have failed to lift the desired quantities of foodgrains under the additional allocation made recently for the Public Distribution System, says the Food Corporation of India (FCI), the central government’s procurement and storage agency. FCI sought instructions from the Centre in September to offload an additional 2.5 million tonnes for the PDS as a consequence of the reports about poor storage and rotting...

Subterfuge is the favourite tool of the corrupt, when caught. That seems to be the case as the Union ministry of commerce and industry proceeds at an elephantine pace in its “inquiry” into the Rs 2,500-crore rice export scam reported in Outlook. Last year, on July 30, Parliament erupted in a furore over the revelation that despite a strict ban on exports, tonnes of 25 per cent broken, non-Basmati rice...

Karnataka is expected to be one of the first beneficiaries of a major subsidised housing programme ‘Rajiv Awas Yojana' for the benefit of the urban poor to be taken up by the Union Government. Bangalore with 577 slums and with a population of nearly 10 lakh living there will stand to be the biggest beneficiary. To begin with, people residing in a total of 3.05 lakh dingy structures or thatched huts in...