From the Middle East to Madagascar, high prices are spawning land grabs and ousting dictators. Welcome to the 21st-century food wars. In the United States, when world wheat prices rise by 75 percent, as they have over the last year, it means the difference between a $2 loaf of bread and a loaf costing maybe $2.10. If, however, you live in New Delhi, those skyrocketing costs really matter: A doubling in...

Madhya Pradesh is betting cash incentives will curb population growth and improve the ‘life cycle’ of the girl child, but experts question the efficacy of such policies in addressing deep-rooted social prejudices Visitors trudging down the dusty village road are greeted by a giant billboard featuring a smiling Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, hugging two young girls. The tagline in Hindi reads: Gaon ki beti, kisse chhoti...

-The New York Times   India has 1.2 billion people, among them bankers, gurus, rag pickers, billionaires, snake charmers, software engineers, lentil farmers, rickshaw drivers, Maoist rebels, Bollywood movie stars and Vedic scholars, to name a few. Humanity runneth over. Except in one profession: India is searching for a hangman. Usually, India would not need one, given the rarity of executions. The last was in 2004. But in May, India's president unexpectedly rejected...

Brinda Karat, Rajya Sabha member and Communist Party of India (Marxist) Polit Bureau member, has protested against non-inclusion of disabled persons in the automatic inclusion category for the 2011 below the poverty line (BPL) census being conducted by the Rural Development Ministry. In a letter to Rural Development Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, she has drawn attention to the May 2, 2003 Supreme Court order, in which the disabled have been listed in...

A recent study finds that selective abortion of girls, especially for pregnancies after a firstborn girl, has increased substantially in India. CENSUS 2011, which brought out several positive features with regard to education, literacy and fertility rates, also confirmed the disturbing trend that had been reported for the first time in the 1991 Census – the increasing gap between the figures for male and female children in the 0-6 age...