Some members of the National Advisory Council , or NAC, are of the view that a small group in the council is driving its agenda to an extreme, making its recommendations vulnerable to government's rejection on the grounds of fiscal prudence. This not only ends Wasting everyone's time, but also does a disservice to the poor and disadvantaged the council seeks to help, by indefinitely delaying progressive legislation, goes the...

A group of tribal women has declared a “ban” on the sale and consumption of liquor, while warning of imposing a hefty penalty on those defying the “prohibition” in Madhya Pradesh's Talanpur village. Fed up with husbands “who get drunk and beat up their wives, apart from Wasting hard-earned money,” the women in the village, about 180 km from here, have come together under the banner of ‘Mahila Samiti,' led by...

The government has a plan to reach welfare to the poor without Wasting money. It wants to put hard cash in their hands instead of spending on welfare programmes. To begin with, it wants to end the public distribution system of food grain and give money directly to the people. Its logic: the new system of cash transfer will plug leakages and save an enormous amount of money. But is it...

With three small children to raise in a dirt-poor village in eastern India’s Bihar state, farm labourer Renu Devi is an unsung rural supermom who shuttles between home and field every day. But the demure 30-year-old mother does not forget to bring her children to the biannual Vitamin A rounds in Bagwanpur Rati, one of the villages in Vaishali district of Bihar. This is because Vitamin A deficiency is a major...

From the time a farmer in India harvests his produce to the time it lands on your plate, farm products go through several layers of middlemen, wholesalers, cold chains and other intermediaries, which push its price up by many notches. The end result: growers get paid less and consumers pay more. The stranglehold that the government has over agriculture produce marketing in India has given rise to abject inefficiencies, lack...