-Live Mint The failure of the UPA government to get the food security Bill passed has exposed its hypocrisy With the budget session of Parliament coming to an early close amid a political logjam, the food security Bill has been stalled again. The blame for this important legislation not winning parliamentary passage in the last four years rests entirely on the Manmohan Singh government, despite its last-minute posturing. The Bill, which was cleared...

-The Times of India India may be facing the shame of 47% of its children suffering from malnutrition and about 30% of its population living below poverty line, but food continues to rot in government granaries. The Food Corporation of India (FCI) has admitted in data accessed through RTI that the amount of damaged wheat has increased from 2,010 million tonnes (MT) in 2009-2010 to 2,401.61 MT (2011-2012). The country has...

-The Indian Express The Congress's bill could end up sponsoring the NDA's campaigns A good thing about the logjam in Parliament, it has to be said, is that it has prevented the ill-advised food security bill from being passed. It would, though, be naive on our part to presume the BJP stalled Parliament - the Congress's blatant abuse of the CBI process was a big reason for this - only because it...

-The Hindu Business Line   The general tendency among Indian policy makers currently is to blame international price movements for the rise in prices of essential food items in India. The extent to which this claim is valid is assessed by examining the specific case of wheat. It is no secret that Indian food prices are increasingly affected by international prices. Ever since 2002, when all quantitative restrictions on Indian imports of agricultural...

-The Economic Times The government is reviewing the norms for keeping buffer stocks of wheat and rice required at a particular time of the year to feed the public distribution system and welfare schemes. The demand for wheat and rice distributed through welfare schemes is expected to rise with the implementation of the food security law. "The government is looking at the issue and we are discussing it with different departments," KV Thomas,...