When noted economist Jean Dreze visited Surguja in Chhattisgarh a decade ago, its utterly non-functional Public Distribution System (PDS) looked like especially “designed to fail.” The National Advisory Committee member has written in a recent article that the ration shop owners illegally sold the grain meant for the poor and “hunger haunted the land.” But that was then. The economist was pleasantly shocked to see the transformation this time. “Ten years...

After insisting in Parliament and elsewhere that the amount of rotting food grain revealed by the Hindustan Times was “exaggerated”, Food and Civil Supplies Minister Sharad Pawar’s own ministry has proven him wrong. Nearly 40 days ago, this paper first reported how 50,000 tonnes of grain had decayed in Punjab alone and 17.8 million tonnes, or as much as France consumes in a month, was at risk from rotting. Pawar and his...

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) as well as state departments in Raigad district have advised people not to consume fish for some time, as they might be contaminated due to the oil spill near the Mumbai harbour. Uran taluka tehsildar, Dilip Walunj, said that it was only a matter of few days that the fish ban advisory had been issued. "Fishermen traditionally do not venture out during monsoon due to...

Banks have designated red zones where the vast majority of Muslim clusters fall. This fact is confirmed by the rash of banking-related complaints received by the National Commission for Minorities. A little over a year ago, Ali Arshad, a resident of Okhla in Delhi, went to a well-known private sector bank to open a bank account. He thought his case would be fast-tracked because he had a banking background, he worked...

It isn't too much of a stretch to say that India is made up of many nations. A comparison of state-level and country-level data from the newly released multi-dimensional poverty index shows that while Kerala and Goa are at a similar level of development as 'middle-income countries' like Indonesia, Jharkhand and Bihar are similar to 'least-developed countries' like the Democratic Republic of Congo. Earlier this month, the new MPI measure...