-The Indian Express The MGNREGS stands out as one of the Indian government's most ambitious social schemes, with far-reaching consequences throughout the economy. The only known recipe for poverty eradication is a combination of high growth and high development spending. Neither is sufficient. A recent study (Kapoor and Ahluwalia, 2012) has shown that post-liberalisation, one champion of poverty reduction in India is Andhra Pradesh. This reduction in poverty is widespread, as...

-DNA The aim is to drive farmers out of agriculture and turn food production into industrial enterprise Some years ago, former President APJ Abdul Kalam was addressing students at an annual event organised by K Govindacharya's Bhartiya Swabhiman Andolan at Gulbarga in Karnataka. He exhorted students to work hard, educate themselves to become doctors, engineers, civil servants, scientists, economists and entrepreneurs. After he had ended his talk, a young student got...

-India Today Geography of rice and wheat has been transformed with Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh generating surpluses Almost 50 years ago, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri went on air to appeal to Indians to skip a meal a day. Foodgrain supplies had come under strain after the 1965 drought, and the patriotic ethos cautioned against over-consumption: what you ate left that much less for the rest. Today, it is...

-Down to Earth As June ends, the monsoon, it turns out, is deficient by 40 per cent. Despite the forecast of its revival in July, it is a concern for India's rainfed areas that account for significant foodgrain production and also host the largest number of farmers in the country. More than 100 districts are officially "chronic drought-affected" areas. Why have we not been able to drought-proof them? On June 28 Prime...

Punjab, which was known to be the land of agricultural prosperity during the 1970s and 1980s thanks to the Green Revolution, has increasingly witnessed its small and marginal farmers being pushed out of the agricultural sector. Based on a survey (conducted in 2012-13) of 288 farmers from 12 villages—2 villages from each of the 6 districts that represent various agro-climatic zones—the study by Sukhpal Singh and Shruti Bhogal reveals that...