-The Indian Express   Compulsory education defeats its own purpose if isn’t sufficiently compulsory and long enough. India has been a late entrant into the community of nations that offer their children free and compulsory education up to a basic level, for a certain minimum number of years. The Right of All Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, passed in 2009, entitled every child between 6 and 14 years of...

Indian farmers have much to celebrate this year with a bumper wheat harvest. As predicted by the ministry of agriculture, wheat farmers have begun to harvest what is shaping up to be a record crop, projected at 84.27 million tonnes. We are growing more wheat than ever before. The earlier record of 80.8 million tonnes of wheat production was achieved in 2009-10. Estimates show that foodgrain production including wheat, rice, pulses...

Eminent economists have shot off a letter to National Advisory Council (NAC) Chairman Sonia Gandhi to ensure that the proposed Food Security Bill is quite comprehensive and excludes only a few rich people. They also want Sonia to get the Bill legislated in such a way it is not based on the current public distribution system (PDS) for all times to come as direct subsidy transfer could also be an...

In the first of a series of reports on land rights, we look at the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where there have been violent clashes between local villagers and police in a dispute over land. It's a hot summer day and the air is thick with smoke from the diesel-powered trucks carrying bricks, cement and sand. There is a long line of vehicles along the road as the trucks jostle...

Oxfam, an international confederation of 15 human rights organisations fighting poverty and injustice, launched a new campaign here on Wednesday for a hunger-free world even as it announced that the number of hungry people the world over has crossed the billion mark and one in four of the world's hungry people live in India. Despite doubling the size of its economy between 1990 and 2005, the number of people in India...