The tragic demise of Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy is a blow to the rights approach to development in India. YSR, as the medical doctor-turned-CM was popularly known, was a pioneer of at least one hundred path breaking rural schemes such as the NREGS and old age pensions that were offered to the poor not as dole but as a matter of right. For records, the first...

The time has come for a comprehensive right-to-food law to tackle the deprivation and food insecurity that haunts India.  Over the last decade or so, a series of developments have drawn attention to the problem of food security. These are the persistence of hunger in many parts of the country being juxtaposed with food surpluses and stocks; the adverse impact of globalisation on agriculture and rising food prices resulting in...

THE LAUNCH of free market liberalisation in 1991 triggered widespread prosperity for the Indian middle classes, making them the showpiece of India’s muchfêted economic boom. But little has ever changed for the bulk of the country’s poor, hundreds of millions of who continue to barely scrape through from day to day, doomed to extreme poverty and, consequently, malnutrition, disease and death. For decades, many among these millions have survived, however...

Even as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has promised that “nobody will go hungry” in the country, the Centre is asking the States to put a ceiling on the number of Below Poverty Line (BPL) beneficiaries under the Targeted Public Distribution System for the purpose of the National Food Security Bill that is in the making. Poverty estimates The Union government wants to limit the “targeted” BPL beneficiaries to 5.91 crore...

Parts of India are on track for severe water shortages, according to results from Nasa's gravity satellites. The Grace mission discovered that in the country's north-west - including Delhi - the water table is falling by about 4cm (1.6 inches) per year. Writing in the journal Nature, they say rainfall has not changed, and water use is too high, mainly for farming. The finding is published two days after an...