Government undecided on criteria to identify families below poverty line A survey by the Indian government in 2002 to determine households below poverty line (BPL) left out many poor families. Nearly a decade later, the Union Ministry of Rural Development (MORD) is trying to set the wrong right. But it is unable to decide on the criteria for identifying poor households. As a consequence, the BPL survey that was to...
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Saga of struggles by Lyla Bavadam
NEARLY 80 km from Pune is Ralegan Siddhi village with about 3,000 people. It would have been one among the hundreds of nondescript villages in Parner taluk of Ahmednagar district, Maharashtra, had it not been for Kisan Baburao Hazare, 71, better known as Anna, or older brother, a title that was appended to his name after he made the village more than just a dot on the map. Until he was...
More »‘Yes, storage, sub-standard grain are problems'
The government on Thursday admitted to problems in storage as well as supply of sub-standard foodgrains to the poor after senior Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Brinda Karat expressed serious concern in the Rajya Sabha over grain rotting. “I do admit,” Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said after Ms. Karat charged the government with supplying rotten foodgrains to remote tribal areas. She showed samples of spoiled wheat and rice in the...
More »Up for Sale: Agricultural land in Chhattisgarh by Vipin Thakur
Another name for Chhattisgarh is ' Dhan ka katora' or 'Rice Bowl'. There is an amazing variety of rice being grown across the region in Central India, largely dominated by tribal communities. This is a land blessed by the bounty of nature and has a combination of soil, water and temperature, which lends itself well to the cultivation of this all-important foodgrain. Yet all this amounts to very little today and...
More »Not smart enough? by Swati Narayan
Smart card technology can be used to streamline India's unwieldy PDS. But it is yet to prove itself under real world challenges. Smart cards have become the latest buzzword to remedy India's public distribution system (PDS) — one of the largest food grain delivery networks in the world with more than 500,000 ‘ration' shops. Electronic voting machines have streamlined Indian elections. Credit cards, which can be swiped for payment at any...
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