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...

Recently an interesting article appeared in The New York Times on how after the completion of a social audit at Nagarkurnool in Andhra Pradesh, villagers punished a local official for swindling funds allocated to the central government's flagship project, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme. The irate villagers tied the official's hands and paraded him around the neighbouring villages. This is not a one-off incident; similar accounts have...

When little children in Cities have a Happy Meal burger at McDonalds and get a Batman car or Ben 10 toy free, they are getting much more for free — all gift-wrapped by wheat and potato farmers in some far-off village. They are not paying for the labour put in by the farmer, the profits forgone by him, and the higher cost of living that he did not bill on...

Scores of farmers took part in a 'Kisan Swaraj Yatra', a rally, which began from Sabarmati in Gujarat and culminated at Mahatma Gandhi's memorial Rajghat here on Saturday, to draw the attention of the government towards the issues concerning the farmers and the continuing agrarian crisis in India.The farmers and representatives of the 'Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture (ASHA)' later met Congress President Sonia Gandhi and briefed her about...

South Asia in general and India in particular have the dubious distinction of standing out for wrong reasons every time a new global poverty report is released. We not only have the largest number of underweight children, a very high maternal mortality rate and the world’s highest number of out of school children but we also top the global malnutrition chart. (See links below for more details)  However the 2011 United...