India is incredible (after shining), with the fastest growth rate, an emerging demographic dividend and innovative brains for the globe. But the vast majority in rural India — employed in agriculture, small-scale and tiny industries, self-employed, and with no assets — does not find it so. This government, claiming inclusive growth for the grossly deprived and poor, has not taken actions to bring down prices of essential food items, unprecedented...

Every year, India adds the population of Australia to its already staggering ranks of 116.1 crore people. Every 10 years, we add the population of Brazil — the fifth most populous country in the world. As yet another World Population Day comes around on July 11, and India stands poised to eclipse China as the most populous country of the world, the government is gingerly attempting to bring incentive-based family planning...

Along with expanded availability and access, safety is one of the three prongs of food security. However, we in India have shockingly little control over the quality of the food we consume — apart from flat-out contami-nation at the level of agricultural produce to the hidden dangers of additives and preservatives and flavours, which can contain benzoates, glutamates, mono- and di-glycerides, nitrates, nitrites, and sulfites, all of which are linked...

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...

In April, India’s Planning Commission accepted recommendations put forth by the so-called Tendulkar Committee on a new poverty headcount for the country. Constituted by the Planning Commission under economist Suresh D Tendulkar, the committee, after four years and a new methodology, arrived at a new figure for the number of Indians living below the poverty line: 37.2 percent, ten points higher than the previous official figure. With the government’s subsequent...