-The Guardian A landmark Bill to make the right to food a legal entitlement is mired in controversy over its failure to address a flawed public food distribution system, misplaced priorities and exclusions India has an over abundance of food grains stocked in warehouses, yet millions of India's poor are left without food. Development practitioners and NGOs are in favour of disbanding the current food security system, the public distribution system (PDS),...
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Net connection excluded from urban poor count -Sobhana K
-The Telegraph New Delhi: Over half of India's urban residents can be called poor. The housing ministry has moved a cabinet note that has classified nearly 52 per cent of town and city dwellers as poor after a socio-economic caste census that is "99 per cent" complete. The ministry has also dropped a criterion from the list of parameters an expert committee had suggested to automatically count in and count out households from...
More »CMs puzzled over implementation of food security programme-Anita Katyal
-Rediff.com While the Delhi and Haryana governments have declared that they are all set to roll-out the food security programme on August 20 -- Rajiv Gandhi's birth anniversary -- there is confusion among the chief ministers about the implementation of the ordinance which gives the right to people to receive adequate quantity of food grains at affordable prices. Anita Katyal reports. Although the ordinance has provided broad parameters that 75 per cent...
More »A flood of telegrams for PM urging an 'end to corruption' -Akshaya Mukul
-The Times of India NEW DELHI: It will be an unusual Monday morning in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's household. Among the bagful of mail he gets daily will be several telegrams urging him to 'end corruption, give us freedom'. As the 160-year-old telegram service wound down on Sunday, one young man's idea of sending a telegram to the PM on corruption caught the fancy of others in the serpentine queue at the...
More »Errant officials well-protected in UPA's game-changer food Bill -Chetan Chauhan
-The Hindustan Times The UPA's new game-changer, the food security bill, provides for lesser penalty for errant officials than the watershed Right To Information Act and a tedious process for booking them. The RTI Act had provided for a maximum penalty of Rs. 25,000 against any official denying information to an applicant. The government has adopted a minimal approach by prescribing just Rs. 5,000 penalty for officials, who fail to provide subsidised...
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