Furious debates among policymakers about the proposed national food security law largely revolve around its financial repercussions. The Planning Commission is finally coming around to accepting the Tendulkar Committee’s estimates of 37.2 per cent BPL population or 8.5 crore BPL households. The fiscal burden in implementing the food security law for 37.5 per cent BPL population, with each household being provided 35 kg food grains, is estimated to be Rs...

The human resource development ministry has tweaked eligibility rules for its college and university scholarship programme for poor students to help those from school boards that are stingy with marks. The change, first mooted soon after Kapil Sibal took over the ministry, will come into effect from the coming academic session itself, government officials said today. Students who score over 80 per cent in their Class XII qualifying examinations are...

IN PATNI, a remote village in Satna district of Madhya Pradesh, sevenmonth- old Sandeep is playing in the mud. He finds a pumpkin seed in the dust and promptly puts it into his mouth. A tiny piece of cow dung, a pebble, a fallen leaf and finally the sole of a rubber slipper follow the pumpkin seed. For Sandeep and the children in the 300- odd families in the village,...

“Wherever there is a lamp, there is darkness below it,” said Bava Bhalekar, a fisherman and local leader in this village roughly a hundred miles south of Mumbai. “The tragedy is that while our village has this project, we ourselves don’t have electricity.” “This project” is the power plant that Enron built. A decade after Enron withdrew from the project, the Indian government and two Indian companies are promising to...

India has played a crucial role in making essential medicines available and affordable for patients in the developing world through generic drugs. This has been possible by linking India’s patent policies and laws to public interest. Similarly, policies that align public funded R&D in India with public health have the potential to provide incentives to the development of medical technologies (vaccines, diagnostics and medicines) crucial for treating neglected diseases like...