Notwithstanding apprehensions expressed by rural development minister Jairam Ramesh on the proposal of giving grain as part payment of wages under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, food minister KV Thomas  on Sunday continued to support the idea. Thomas said, “There is enough surplus grain to be given to poor families.” In a recent letter to the Jairam Ramesh, Thomas had made the proposal, which he said would also help ease...

-Reuters   PERLE: As a shiny red harvester bounces across the black earth into the first row of sugar cane, excited schoolchildren run after it and several dozen men stand gaping in the wake of its swift progress. It's the first time that Perle, a village on the banks of the Krishna river in Maharashtra state, has seen a machine used for cutting the tough cane. "This machine will harvest my entire field today,"...

The Rajasthan Youth Association Metro's food bank provides a meal a day to over 200 institutions across Chennai. Prince Frederick meets the people behind the 20-year initiative In its 2010 report, the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) states that just seven countries — India, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Ethiopia — account for 65 per cent of the world's hungry.” The World Food Programme...

The key issue is not availability or resources but last mile delivery: how to reach foodgrains to people. In ancient Greece, the punishment given to Tantalus was to tie a cup around his neck and fill it with water. Every time he bent to take a sip, the cup would drop further and he would never get a drop into his parched mouth. From this comes the word “tantalizing”. Something like...

Student of Pune-based MIT School of Government (MITSOG), Harshvardhan Reddy, who hails from Karni village in Mahabubnagar district in Andhra Pradesh, has kept the Right to Information (RTI) flag flying high by filing over 300 RTI applications along with over 200 first appeals within a short span of two years. The first RTI application, Reddy said, was filed by him against the rural superintendent of police (SP) for delaying his passport...