The Samanda community and rural development block has achieved the unique distinction of 99.97 person days per household and become the first in the state to provide 100 man days for each registered household under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). As many as 149 out of 151 village employment councils achieved the target. Samanda is near Williamnagar, the district headquarters of East Garo Hills, and is about 325km from...

It is not often that a social security programme the size of Mahatma Gandhi NREGS - New Delhi has spent Rs 40,000 crore on it in 2010/11 alone - faces an existential moment. But, April 2011 will present one such crossroad: the end of the term of a bureaucrat widely acknowledged as the prime mover behind the five-year old scheme. Brought in six years ago to the Centre from her parent...

As the World Bank and International Monetary Fund convene for their annual Spring Meetings here, soaring food prices are high on the agenda, prompting some analysts to fast-forward to 2050 and the question of how to nourish the mid-century's estimated world population of 8.9 billion people – the majority of whom will live in developing countries. "More poor people are suffering and more people could become poor because of high and...

According Maharashtra agriculture department estimates, soyabean is no longer the prime favourite in India's second largest producer as farmers shift to cotton. That could be a setback for India's attempts to become more self-sufficient in cooking oil, which is the second largest import item after crude oil. "Due to good price realisation for cotton this year, area conversion from soya to cotton is most likely to happen. It is too...

India still has a long way to go in achieving food and nutritional security, albeit the country has achieved record production with 5.4% growth in agriculture and allied sector. This was corroborated by Sharad Pawar, minister of agriculture and food processing, while addressing the National Conference on Agriculture for Kharif Campaign-2011 in New Delhi recently. "Record production with 235.88 Mt of foodgrains in 2010-2011 should not lead to complacency as we...