I want you to consider some well-known, oft-repeated facts: * About half of India’s children are malnourished, a record poorer than the world’s poorest area, sub-Saharan Africa. * India is home to a quarter of the world’s hungry — about 230 million people — according to the World Food Programme. * India is the world’s second-largest grower of rice and wheat, and more than 50 million tonnes of foodgrains lie in...

The PDS in Orissa does not stand for public distribution system, rather, a `perpetual dishonesty structure’ orchestrated by the Government agencies with politicians as bandleader. This is the impression of the recently submitted report of the Justice Wadhwa Committee appointed by the Apex Court to look into the functioning of PDS in Orissa. A clinical inquiry by the committee reveals how murky the system is. The malady afflicts right from the identification of...

Though Palakkad district in Kerala, where the Coca Cola plant is situated is considered as the ‘rice bowl of Kerala’, a part of the district falling in the rain shadow region of the Western Ghats is drought prone. Plachimada, where the Hindustan Coca Cola Beverages Private Limited (HCBPL) factory was set up had been classified ‘arable’. The villagers are predominantly landless agricultural labourers with almost 80 percent of the population...

Members of the Right to Food Campaign on Monday “rejected'' the proposed draft of the National Food Security Bill that promises 25 kg. of food grains to each Below Poverty line population family a month at Rs. 3 a kg and urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to come up with a bill that covers every adult resident of the country under the Public Distribution System (PDS). “Nothing short of a universal...

The central vigilance committee led by retired Justice D. P. Wadhwa, which was established by the Supreme Court of India to monitor its orders in the PIL on the right to food, has come out with a strong indictment of the public distribution system (PDS). Based on State-level reports for Delhi, Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Karnataka, the committee has identified widespread corruption at different levels of the...