I have never been to Brazil's "beautiful horizon", Belo Horizonte, the country's third-largest metropolitan area and an information and bio-technology hub, but I have followed the city's progress against what was once its enduring shame: hunger. In 1993, when 11% of its 2.5 million people lived in absolute poverty and a fifth of Belo's children went hungry, a newly-elected government declared that food was a fundamental right of every citizen,...

-The Business Standard   Too much grain, and no way to distribute it In about a month from now, the country’s ever-bulging foodgrain stockpile will bloat further to over 75 million tonnes, a record amount. This will be nearly two-and-a-half times the stipulated maximum food buffer. Worse, it will outstrip the available warehousing capacity (covered and open) of 63 million tonnes by a wide margin. Even today, a good part of the present...

-PTI The opposition Congress today demanded a CBI probe into the alleged illegal mining in the BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh. The demand was made by leader of opposition Ajay Singh while releasing a book based on the issues raised by the Congress during the debate on the no-confidence motion tabled in the House in the last winter session. The book, `Madhya Pradesh Ki Janata Ka Avishwas, Darakti Sarkar' was released by Ajay in the...

-Express News Service Terming the existing institutional and legal structures of water management in the country as “inadequate”, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday advocated for “urgent” reforms and batted for an “overarching national legal framework” for the governance of the sector.   Inaugurating India Water Week, which will be celebrated in April every year from now, Singh said: “One of the problems in achieving better management is that the current institutional and...

The time has come for optimal pricing of water and power to prevent an unlimited pumping of groundwater and aid better coordination amongst competing demands for the scarce resource, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said here on Tuesday. Dr. Singh's observations come at a time when there is a debate on the pricing of water and privatisation of services in the sector. The Ministry of Water Resources is working on a reforms-oriented...