With more than 400 million Indians going to bed hungry each day, food security has become a crucial issue. On June 4 last year, the president made an announcement: “My government proposes to enact a new law — the National Food Security Act — that will provide statutory basis for a framework which assures food security for all. Every family below the poverty line in rural as well as urban...

Existing and prospective industry and mining players of Jharkhand are apprehensive about the draft mining bill, which seeks to make them share 26 per cent of profits with locals. A group of ministers (GoM) approved the draft bill on September 17. Speaking to The Telegraph, Jindal Steel & Power Limited’s (JSPL) senior deputy general manager (corporate affairs) V.P. Sharan said: “The proposed clause — sharing profits with local people — sounds...

Activist and academic Raj Patel’s profile proudly notes that he has worked for the World Bank and the WTO, and protested against them both around the world. A visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley’s Centre for African Studies, Patel’s latest offering to the literary world—The Value of Nothing—is a New York Times bestseller. In an interview with Ashish Kumar Sen, Patel says beating the drum of India...

Punjab-based farmers, who are known for feeding the country, now want to try their hands offshore, with a group of progressive farmers all set to acquire 50,000 hectares of farm land on lease in Ethiopia for growing high-value cash crops, including pulses and maize. "We will be inking a deal with the Ethiopia government next month for getting at least 50,000 hectares of area for growing crops like pulses and...

Jagdishji Vaghela is one of hundreds of thousands of farmers standing in the way of India's breakneck economic expansion. Determined not to give up his land for an industrial park in the western state of Gujarat, the 55-year-old farmer scorns at talk of how the benefits of industrialization in Asia's third-largest economy will trickle down to people like him. Despite a nearby plant producing what is touted as the world's cheapest car,...