A combination of political commitment, awareness and better transparency has ensured that the PDS in Tamil Nadu works as intended, ensuring food security for all. Believe it or not, the Public Distribution System (PDS) is working quite successfully in Tamil Nadu — this is one of the main lessons we have learnt from a recent survey of the PDS in Dindigul and Dharmapuri districts. Be it political commitment that lies behind...

In March this year, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) raided the houses and businesses of a few top industrialists in Dhanbad, Jharkhand, home to one of the subsidiaries of India's biggest coal miner, Coal India (CIL). Dhanbad is more widely known in popular imagination as home of the infamous 'coal mafia', which spread a reign of terror across the coal mining districts of the then undivided Bihar in the...

The acronym LPG has several expansions. It stands for liquefied petroleum gas. It stands for liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation, a term of abuse used by those with Leftwing persuasions. It stands for life plundered by the government, sentiments associated with those who are against state intervention, but increasingly felt by the so-called middle class - however defined - because of price hikes, and proposed price hikes, for petroleum products. Ostensibly, price...

The government has introduced the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation & Resettlement Bill, 2011, in Parliament. The Bill fails to address fundamental causes behind disputes and litigation over compensation. Moreover, like the existing law, it has provisions that can be misused by states to favour companies at the expense of the rights of farmers and forest dwellers. An excessive use of the emergency clause is not the only abuse of the current law...

-The Indian Express Unfinished car shells rusting in a deserted factory in India's West Bengal state lie testimony to flaws in a century-old land-acquisition law the government now wants to replace. * Jobs, housing, cash to landowners made mandatory * Costs, project delays to increase - Indian corporates react * Bill to push up costs by 350 pct for big plots - analysts, cos * Bill likely to be passed in December Tata Motors was forced...