Rising farm wages, which have a major impact on food prices, may force the government to devise a blueprint in which agricultural work is included under a widened ambit of a government's flagship job surety scheme, a key government official said. "We may need to come up with some sort of a special agreement for wage payment to beneficiaries working on farms since they are privately owned," Ashok Gulati, noted farm...

Climbing food prices across Asia, especially India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Laos, might slow down by at least five years the region’s efforts to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger under the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), a UN ESCAP (Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific) report has cautioned. The report says India is among the mostaffected countries. According to the report, the rising food prices prevented more than 19...

The Centre will come up with a ‘Look East’ policy to boost kharif staple rice production in eastern states. A national-level conference scheduled to be held in New Delhi on April 6-7 will formulate strategies to maximise summer-sown crop output by hiking area and production in eastern states, which have more irrigated, alluvial soil and higher water table than those in the northwest.   “The focus will be on rice and introduction...

Distribution of basic food grains and fuel at controlled prices every month through the Public Distribution System (PDS) could be the largest service provided by the Indian State, touching as it does over 65 million families through a network of nearly half a million retail shops. Given that the urban middle class has little stake in the health of the PDS, there have to be some compelling reasons for the...

Cash transfer as substitute for state service provision is a dangerous recipe for callously anti-poor and corrupt governance. THE staggering number of recent articles, papers and books on the virtues of giving cash in place of public services to the poor has created an impression that a sort of epidemic has broken out. Economists, policymakers, bureaucrats and newspaper commentators are all infected by it and are in turn infecting others. The central...