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 National Food Security Bill, 2011, designed to make access to food a legal right, is the last chance to convert Gandhiji's vision of a hunger-free India into reality. What Mahatma Gandhi said of the role of food in a human being's life in a 1946 speech at Noakhali, now in Bangladesh, remains the most powerful expression of the importance of making access to food a basic human right. Gandhiji also...

The past couple of months have seen a renewed attack on the National Advisory Council (NAC). The NAC has been decried as an unconstitutional, undemocratic, “super-cabinet” where unaccountable “jholawalas” hatch harebrained schemes guaranteed to run the government aground. Another line of criticism has focused on the process of the formation of the NAC, its space within the Indian Constitution, and its capacity to influence policy. The two criticisms merge with...

-The Economic Times The Parliamentary Standing Committee on finance has questioned the government's move to introduce a right to food bill when it did not have a single, widely-accepted definition of the poor. The "criteria of identification of the poor remains nebulous," the Yashwant Sinha-headed committee has observed. The proposed food security bill, seen as the largest such legislation anywhere in the world, hinges on the definition of the poor. The...

Budget 2011-12 and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. THREE decades ago, in the early years of the Special Component Plan (SCP) for Scheduled Castes – very recently renamed inappropriately as Scheduled Castes Sub-Plan (SCSP) – Indira Gandhi on her return as Prime Minister wrote two historical D.O. letters dated March 12, 1980, one to Central Ministers and the other to State Chief Ministers, regarding the SCP in the Central...