Centre to notify revised poverty estimates to States soon The Union government will soon notify the revised poverty estimates on the basis of which States can undertake proper identification of beneficiaries under the public distribution system (PDS). This will include a massive exercise to include eligible beneficiaries and weed out the ineligible ones through use of biometric technology, which will replace the manual system of identification. Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh...

Seeking to build on the strengths of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) while, at the same time, eliminating its main deficiencies and shortcomings, the rural development ministry is planning to take UPA government’s flagship project to a new level. A three-day-long workshop of the coordination group attached to the ministry, as also other principal stakeholders, gets underway at the Hyderabad-based National Institute of Rural Development from...

Since she could remember, labourer Rama Nag (34) didn't know what her ration card meant, that as one of India's nearly 400 million officially poor people, she was entitled to subsidised foodgrain. Until 2006, here in the heart of impoverished tribal India, on the edge of the sprawling forests of Bastar and the Maoist zone of Dantewada, Nag and her family of four survived on rice and whatever they could...

AS CONCERN for the ecosystem runs high all across the world, a small, mountainous state in India’s northeast — Sikkim, has taken a step ahead and declared to go completely organic by the year 2015. What this means is the total phasing out of chemical inputs from agriculture. Sikkim has long been an ecologically conscious state with initiatives such as a comprehensive ban on plastic, bio-medical and chemical waste in...

The fraught issue of introduction of Bt Brinjal has been shelved but all eyes are now set on the controversial Seed Bill 2010, likely to be tabled in the monsoon session of Parliament beginning July 26. The bill aims to regulate the quality of seeds for sale, import and export and to facilitate production and supply of seeds of quality, but fails to address a crucial issue — seed pricing....