-PTI Faced with acute shortage of storage capacity, the Centre today asked states to lift PDS foodgrains needed for at least six months and build intermediate godowns to ease pressure on Food Corporation of India godowns. "We have requested state governments to offtake at least six months of foodgrains needed for PDS. Our storage capacity of FCI is 64 million tonnes and our present stock is about 82-83 million tonnes," Minister of...

A compromise formula aimed at breaking the deadlock between teachers and HRD minister Kapil Sibal over admissions to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) could end up hurting hundreds of thousands of aspiring students. Under the new formula, only the top 20% students in their respective class 12 board exams would be eligible for appearing in the IIT entrance exam, top government and IIT sources told HT. The compromise was brokered by...

Social protection has seen a sharp focus in the development policy agenda during the past decade. There is also a clear trend for making social protection, as well as food security, “rights-based”, rather than “discretionary”. Yet, no clear consensus has so far emerged concerning many basic design choices and implementation modalities. The Food Security Act 2011, which is now under the consideration of our parliament, is designed to achieve the...

-The Hindu India has reason to come away feeling pleased with the outcome of the seventh G-20 summit, which concluded in Los Cabos on Tuesday. First, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ticked the Europeans off for landing themselves and the world economy in such a big mess and then expecting handouts from even poor countries. Second, the Prime Minister’s consistent stand, that growth and austerity have to be combined, has also finally found...

John Vidal, who was in Rio for the '92 Earth summit, looks back at that momentous event, and how the 2012 version compares Helicopters thundered up and down the chic Copacabana and Ipanema beaches. Tanks guarded the bridges and tunnels. The favelas were in lockdown, schools closed and supermarkets stood empty. Unexpectedly, George H W Bush, the 41st US president, flush with success at the collapse of communism, had arrived in...