Farm technologies are not reaching farmers on the ground, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh observed here on Monday and said “it represents the failure of the system.” He was speaking at the Golden Jubilee convocation of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) here. The annual farm growth rate was expected to be 3.5 per cent in the 12th Plan period ending this year, he said, but there was concern over the gap between...

You know your negotiating strategy is in trouble when countries ranging as far as Norway in the developed world to partners like South Africa and neighbours like Bangladesh start quoting Gandhi and Nehru back to you. Two months ago, this was the unfortunate situation Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan had to face at the Durban conference on climate change. That she managed, through a passionate last-minute speech, to ensure that all was...

The recommendations of the Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Access to Universal Healthcare are significant because they make explicit the need to contextualise health within the rights. However, the problem with the report is that it does not ask why many of the same recommendations that were made by previous committees have not been implemented. The HLEG neither recognises the problems, constraints and compulsions at the national, state...

There can be little quarrel with the argument that India requires a comprehensive policy to prevent sex selection as put forward by National Advisory Council members Farah Naqvi and A.K. Shiva Kumar in The Hindu (“India & the sex selection conundrum,” January 24, 2012). That the use of sex selection technologies to abort female foetuses is linked to the increasing devaluation and disempowerment of women is well known. It is...

Like many board games that were developed in India, of which chess is perhaps the most important and famous, the game of “snakes and ladders” too emerged in this country a long time ago. With its balancing of snakes that pull you down and ladders that take you up, this game has been used again and again as a metaphor for life, telling us about our fortunes and misfortunes, and...