The Planning Commission has decided to disown the Integrated Action Plan (IAP) for Selected Tribal and Backward Districts that it authored and was approved by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) — in a vastly amended form — in November last. Currently being implemented in 60 Left wing extremist (LWE)-affected districts, the plan was watered down by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) before it received the CCEA nod. Having...

Fundamentally, our current crisis in food supplies as well as food prices arises out of the sidelining of Jawahar Lal Nehru’s dictum “everything else can wait but not agriculture”. Unfortunately, the last twenty years have been characterised by very low rates of agricultural growth, averaging around one percent per annum. This is almost equal to the rate of GDP growth during the last half century of British rule. In effect, in...

NC Saxena , the influential former bureaucrat who is a member of the National Advisory Council, has raised the ineffectiveness of government programmes among tribal people in a paper that will come up for discussion before the Sonia-Gandhi headed council. The government relied on a report by Saxena last year in denying clearance to a large mining project by Vedanta Resources in Orissa’s Niyamgiri hills . This had attracted international...

Union rural development and PANCHAYATI RAJ minister C P Joshi on Wednesday suggested that the re c o rd s maintained under the M a h at m a Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme could be used to identify the poor to prepare the BPL census 2011. Emphasising the need for a one-dimensional reference for surveying the BPL families, Joshi said that identifying the ‘real’ poor was getting tougher in...

Chhattisgarh tribals punished for exercising rights under Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act It was unconstitutional, violation of PESA, says petition It was pushed by local administration, politicians to set up thermal power plant One morning in March 2010, residents of Premnagar awoke to discover they were villagers no more. An administrative notification had dissolved Premnagar's village council or gram panchayat and replaced it with a city council or nagar panchayat. Unbeknownst to...