Legislation targets poor and vulnerable sections among whom malnutrition was particularly high Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Thursday that the government was committed to bring to Parliament a Right to Food Act which would serve as a viable safety net for the poor and the vulnerable sections among whom malnutrition was particularly high. Addressing an international conference on ‘Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition and Health,' the Prime Minister said such...

It is time for us to take a hard look at our agricultural system. We are not yet reliving the food crisis of 2007-08 , but food prices are surging, with global prices for wheat and maize rising by 75% and 60%, respectively, from June to December 2010. Meanwhile, nearly 1 billion people worldwide are going hungry. The obvious solution to many of our food-related ills is to accelerate agricultural growth....

There are many critics and sceptics with respect to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which came into being because of political pressure that managed to overcome quite strenuous opposition from some of the most influential policy making circles. It is likely that much of this criticism is not really because of the declared reasons, like fiscal costs (which are thus far very little) and potential leakage. Rather,...

Senior United Nations officials today called for urgent steps to rein in the rising prices for basic farm produce, petroleum and raw industrial materials whose volatility hits the world’s poorest people the hardest.     “Such volatility has huge negative impacts on vulnerable groups, such as low-income households in developing countries, for whom food expenditure can account for up to 80 per cent of household budgets,” UN Conference on Trade and Development...

The coal ministry has rejected the Planning Commission’s suggestion to allow phased extraction of coal from prohibited areas saying that the robust demand for coal from expanding steelmakers and power generators fast outpaces the plan to mine in stages. The Planning Commission had mooted the idea of phased coal mining in about 203 coalfields, that were earlier declared out-of-bounds for mining by the environment ministry. But strong mining potential at the restricted...