Travelling in rural India always yields rich insights into how poor women struggle to provide that little extra, in terms of food, for the family meal. It was in the village of Vijaypura – in the drought prone Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh – that I came across Bharati, a 39-year-old farm woman and homemaker, working her everyday magic by laying out slices of potato and whole green chillies on the...

The Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) has warned against the increasing leasing and buying of millions of hectares of farmlands in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America for food and fuel production. This land is being leased to private investors and sovereign wealth funds with no explicit legal agreement on how water will be used on these farmlands. The World Bank has estimated that over 56 million hectares of land in Africa...

Dairy farmers and contractors in western Uttar Pradesh and Punjab are on a warpath after private milk companies reduced procurement prices to take advantage of a bumper milk production. Farmers allege that companies are profiteering because they have not simultaneously reduced consumer prices. But companies say they have huge stocks of unsold milk and milk powder and a cut in procurement prices is to bring pressure on government to allow exports.  Cooperatives...

-Economic and Political Weekly   Budget 2012, built yet again at the altar of fiscal fundamentalism, will not convince anybody. In this era of immediate assessment it took just a few minutes for the Union Budget for 2012-13 to be given one or the other negative appellation – “lacklustre”, “anti-growth”, “back to the 1980s”, “without reform” and the like. Such evaluations forget that union budgets have long since ceased to be statements of...

-IANS Debunking the government's claim that the number of poor  in India has come down, a top adviser has claimed that around 70 % of the country's 1.2 billion population is poor, and stressed the need for a multi-dimensional assessment of poverty.  "The government claim that poverty has come down is not valid... there is a need for a multi-dimensional assessment of poverty as around 70% of the population is poor," National Advisory...