Dr MS Swaminathan, NAC member and the father of India's green revolution talks to Rupashree Nanda on the food security legislation, the neglect in creating storage infrastructure and ideas like outsourcing food security issues. Rupashree Nanda: The main reason for the NAC climb down from the promised universal PDS to targeted PDS was the stated non - availability of foodgrains. Would you agree to that argument? Isn't there is not enough...

India is likely to harvest a record 16.5 million tonne pulses this year. This was announced by the Agriculture Minister, Shri Sharad Pawar, at the 6th Agriwatch Global Pulses Summit here today. The Minister said that though India presently imports a large quantity of pulses, the use of new production technologies and agronomic practices, and government support will lead to self sufficiency. Shri Pawar said that more aggressive promotion of available technologies...

Often called Chanakya for his political astuteness, Engineer-politician Nitish Kumar blended his secularist ideology with pragmatic politics and combined the development plank with innovative social engineeering equations in Bihar to bask in glory yet again. Doing an encore after today's landslide victory, the 59-year-old chief minister with his trademark kurta pyjama and grey stubble has become RJD strongman Lalu Prasad's nemesis single handedly contributing to the electoral meltdown of RJD-led Secular...

Could India's mock war on poverty ever turn real? India became independent 63 years ago. Since Independence the country has implemented 10 Five Year Plans and a few Annual Plans. Currently the 11th Plan is being executed. Efforts made during the last six decades have resulted in the modernisation of a stagnant economy and India's emergence as a major industrial power. This period also witnessed remarkable progress in agricultural production. But India...

A meticulous study of the agrarian relations in three villages. ONE of our senior sociologists once drew my attention to the distinction between economics and other social sciences. Other social sciences – sociology and anthropology, for instance – he said, pay a great deal of attention to gathering primary data and interpreting them, whereas economics relies on secondary data for its analysis. This is, to a large extent, a fair...