-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...

-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...

-GRISTMedia.com In the course of my work as part of a team set up to look into the socio-economic status of Adivasi communities, there were several things I learned about the Land Acquisition Act, 2013, and the amendments to it. Here are some important questions about land and the Act that we should be asking: * What is the State's relationship to land and its citizens? This a key question - and one...

-Business Standard The Shanta Kumar Committee on restructuring FCI has suggested the reach of the National Food Security Act be curtailed to 40 per cent of the population The National Democratic Alliance government set up the high-level Shanta Kumar Committee to restructure and reform the state-owned Food Corporation of India. Instead, the panel ended up providing a road map to restructure the entire farming and food security policy of the government. In...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Sections of wildlife biologists have questioned the methodology India has adopted for its tiger census, saying it does not yield results to accurately measure changes in numbers either within a particular region or across the country. The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), a non-government partner that was involved in the tiger estimation exercise, said the "double-sampling" approach the Union environment and forests ministry adopted was "not the best currently...