As many as 56 villages in the Saranda forests, freed from over 10 years of Maoist dominance in a month-long offensive in August, is set to see a new era of development with the Centre planning to showcase it as a test case to prove that police action is no impediment to building social infrastructure. Union rural development minister Jairam Ramesh, who visited the Jharkhand capital last week, has sent a...

Makes case for Attorney General’s argument before SC. With the battle over identifying India’s poor moving to the Supreme Court, the Planning Commission has told Attorney General G Vahanvati that the controversial poverty line will not determine the Centre’s liability on subsidised food, but instead will be based on the eligibility limit in the proposed Food Security Act. “The Central government’s liability will be capped, but the cap will not be the...

The Planning Commission’s poverty line affidavit has exposed how blissfully ignorant the glorified economists of the UPA are of the true reality of India The 2G spectrum scam, Commonwealth Games loot, cash-for-vote bribery, Lokpal fiasco, Pranab-Chidambaram duel on the Finance Ministry note, and the count goes on. It seems the UPA-II is stuck in a rut.  As if the battering by the united Opposition and hauling over the coals by civil...

-The Hindu   The controversy over who in India is ‘poor’ enough to receive state support has been partially laid to rest. A joint statement by the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission and the Minister for Rural Development has declared that data collected by the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC), 2011 will be the basis for identifying those deemed eligible for entitlements under various central government programmes. India’s official poverty estimates based...

“There is never enough rice to go around for the whole family,” says tribal woman Leela   With a handful of grain and a head full of recipes, Leela cooks rice in a pot balanced on three stones in a room with a few bricks knocked out to let in sunlight in this village barely 150 km from Raipur, Chhattisgarh capital. When rice is scarce, she adds more water to make a broth,...