-Live Mint The fundamental pathology of Indian policy is the overwhelming preference for subsidies over public goods One useful way to understand a fundamental flaw in policymaking in India since 2004 is to ask a rhetorical question: why is the ruling United Progressive Alliance aggressively pushing for a law guaranteeing the right to food rather than one for the right to clean drinking water? Take a look at the numbers. A February...

-PTI NEW DELHI: The government plans to convene a special session of Parliament for passage of the Food Security Bill as a divided Cabinet on Thursday shunned the idea of promulgating an ordinance to implement the watershed legislation. A meeting of the Cabinet could not arrive at a decision on bringing an ordinance to implement the UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi's pet programme and instead decided to court opposition parties for passage of...

-The Telegraph The government has decided to bring in an ordinance to ensure legal right to subsidised food for two-thirds of the country's population, choosing the executive route to avoid parliamentary debates and sharing credit with the Opposition. Sources said the Union cabinet was expected to take up the National Food Security Ordinance on Thursday and added that it was likely to be cleared and sent for presidential assent the same day. "The...

-The Business Standard Chhattisgarh proves no cash transfer or UID is needed to make PDS work Viewed from a ration shop in Surguja in the largely poor tribal north of Chhattisgarh, the arguments for and against the food security Bill seem way off the mark. We had travelled there to see first-hand Chhattisgarh's much-celebrated transformation of its broken, corrupt public distribution system (a recent survey found that wastage of PDS grain dropped...

-The Hindu Switching to renewable energy sources in the country's midday meal programme will save millions of rupees. But only a few kitchens are doing anything about it, says the author. This is a story of facts and figures and sheer size. Of an auditorium-sized room dense with hot steam from cooking. Of seven tonnes of cooked rice and four tanker-loads of steaming sambar that needed 70 pairs of hands for cutting...