-Reuters   Sitting at the edge of fields in the heart of India's grain bowl, Gurdayal Singh Malik shakes his head in resignation about the lack of workers needed for his 60-acre farm, blaming the government's flagship welfare program, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS), for the shortage. Ever since the start of the program, which guarantees 100 days of work a year for rural households, the flow of...

FAO forecast of generally tight situation for most crops and commodities over next 18 months. Consumers are unlikely to get relief from high food prices till December 2012, despite a modest increase in global foodgrain production. High and volatile agricultural commodity prices are likely to prevail for the rest of this year and into 2012, says a report of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. The next few months...

The current perception that cash transfers can replace public provision of basic goods and services and become a catch-all solution for poverty reduction is false. Where cash transfers have helped to reduce poverty, they have added to public provision, not replaced it. For crucial items like food, direct provision protects poor consumers from rising prices and is part of a broader strategy to ensure domestic supply. Problems like targeting errors...

-The Business Standard   Only anecdotal evidence has been available so far to back the assertion that there has been a sharp rise in agricultural wages. Now, field data bear out the trend. Collected by the Shimla-based Labour Bureau, these numbers show a roughly 50 per cent cumulative rise in rural labour wages in the past two years. The increase in Andhra Pradesh has been assessed at over 40 per cent...

A new data analysed by the Planning Commission says that around 382 million Indians were below poverty line in 2009-10, a decline of 27 million since 2004-05.   The decline of over five percentage points (from 37.2% to 32%) in as many years was much less than the target of annual reduction of 2% in poverty in the 11th plan. What the UPA government can showcase is the highest poverty reduction...