The official line is simple. Since we cannot afford to feed all the hungry, there must only be as many hungry as we can afford to feed. There was irony in the timing of the petrol price decontrol order. The decision, which also covered major hikes in diesel and kerosene prices, and affects hundreds of millions of people, came even as Manmohan Singh advised world leaders in Toronto on the need...

Chanchala Devi always wanted a house. Not a mud-and-stick hut, like her current home in this desolate village in the mineral-rich, corruption-corroded state of Jharkhand, but a proper brick-and-mortar house. When she heard that a government program for the poor would give her about $700 to build that house, she applied immediately. As an impoverished day labourer from a downtrodden caste, she was an ideal candidate for the grant. Yet she...

“Governments and international agencies urgently need to boost ecological farming techniques to increase food production and save the climate,” said UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, while presenting the findings at an international meeting on agroecology held in Brussels on 21 and 22 June. Along with 25 of the world’s most renowned experts on agroecology, the UN expert urged the international community to re-think current agricultural...

PONDICHERRY, India — P.M.L. Kalayansundaram calls himself a human rights worker. He runs an organization that provides a variety of services to villagers in this area — legal aid, financial assistance to help them organize marriage and death ceremonies, and free refrigerated coffin boxes that they would otherwise have to procure at exorbitant rates from private merchants. On a recent afternoon, he told me that he had been determined from...

"It is wrong to say that we will become a super cabinet. We are here to get the Indian bureaucracy to see reason to carry forward social projects related to areas like health, food, agriculture speedily and make sure that people like (Planning Commission deputy chairman) Montek Singh Ahluwalia gets the correct picture and figures on social issues," a member of the National Advisory Council told rediff.com. The member argued...