-The Hindu No qualified candidates to contest; seven posts fall vacant Jaipur: The impact of the amended Rajasthan Panchayati Raj Act, 1994 to include minimum educational qualification as an eligibility criteria for contesting the Panchayat elections, is now becoming visible with reports of posts going vacant pouring in from across the State. Worse, the Sikar police have arrested a gang of people who have reportedly sold fake marks sheets and Transfer Certificates to...

-Economic and Political Weekly   A "high-level" committee makes half-baked recommendations which will rollback the PDS. A ccording to media reports, former Union Minister for Food Shanta Kumar recently disowned the National Food Security Act (NFSA) on behalf of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He explained, without blinking, that the BJP had just pretended to support the Act when it was being discussed in Parliament, for fear of the possible electoral consequences of...

-The Hindu The Shanta Kumar Committee's recommendations to unbundle the Food Corporation of India are in tune with U.S.-led demands raised in the World Trade Organization The Shanta Kumar Committee report, released last week, on a range of issues relating to procurement, storage and distribution of food grains is not only deeply flawed in its reading of the situation on food security, but also short on facts. It was prepared under the...

-Scroll.in The strongest safeguard against fraud is not end-to-end computerisation but clarity of entitlements: if people know what is due to them, they will fight for it. In a stunning admission of party hypocrisy, former Food Minister Shanta Kumar recently stated that the Bharatiya Janata Party's support for the National Food Security Act last year was just a pretence. Remember, when the act was being discussed in Parliament, BJP leaders (from Narendra...

-The Times of India NAGPUR: 'Smart Agriculture' is a concept that is being proposed by scientists, experts and planners as an answer to climate change which, along with other causes, is making agriculture unsustainable. Smart agriculture is also being projected to increase overall productivity, generate more employment and also conserve environment. Speaking to TOI, JC Katyal, former deputy director general of Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and former vice-chancellor of Haryana...