The wages under the government's flagship rural employment scheme have risen following adjustments for price rise, creating apprehension that this may add to the inflationary pressures by making farming more expensive.  The government had early last year benchmarked wages under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act to retail inflation to ensure a real wage of Rs 100 a day to workers seeking employment under the scheme.  Under the first such...

Travelling in rural India always yields rich insights into how poor women struggle to provide that little extra, in terms of food, for the family meal. It was in the village of Vijaypura – in the drought prone Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh – that I came across Bharati, a 39-year-old farm woman and homemaker, working her everyday magic by laying out slices of potato and whole green chillies on the...

The Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) has warned against the increasing leasing and buying of millions of hectares of farmlands in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America for food and fuel production. This land is being leased to private investors and sovereign wealth funds with no explicit legal agreement on how water will be used on these farmlands. The World Bank has estimated that over 56 million hectares of land in Africa...

Dairy farmers and contractors in western Uttar Pradesh and Punjab are on a warpath after private milk companies reduced procurement prices to take advantage of a bumper milk production. Farmers allege that companies are profiteering because they have not simultaneously reduced consumer prices. But companies say they have huge stocks of unsold milk and milk powder and a cut in procurement prices is to bring pressure on government to allow exports.  Cooperatives...

To get the Below Poverty Line figures in perspective, we need to closely monitor the numbers driving the Corporate Plunder Line. One Tendulkar makes the big scores. The other wrecks the averages. The Planning Commission clearly prefers Suresh to Sachin. Using Professor Tendulkar's methodology, it declares that there's been another massive fall in poverty. Yes, another (“more dramatic in the rural areas”). “Record Fall in Poverty” reads one headline. The record...