Farmers are improving crop yields, using new technologies besides learning video-making skills — thanks to Digital Green which is catalysing a quiet revolution in the little hamlets of India. Delhi-based Digital Green focusses on educating farmers about farming techniques through locally produced videos in which local cultivators are featured. The project works in over 200 villages across Jharkhand, Orissa, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh with seven NGOs, helping famers improve their...

A logo for the Right to Information (RTI) Act, designed by a faculty of the National Institute of Design (NID), created quite a buzz in Ahmedabad on Wednesday. But the revelation, it seems, has not gone down too well with RTI activists in the city. They have not only expressed their displeasure by saying the process lacks ‘transparency’, but also filed an RTI seeking details pertaining to the entire process. The...

When noted economist Jean Dreze visited Surguja in Chhattisgarh a decade ago, its utterly non-functional Public Distribution System (PDS) looked like especially “designed to fail.” The National Advisory Committee member has written in a recent article that the ration shop owners illegally sold the grain meant for the poor and “hunger haunted the land.” But that was then. The economist was pleasantly shocked to see the transformation this time. “Ten years...

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was right when he maintained in his meeting with the Media that the judiciary should not stray into the realm of policy formulation for food management. But the same plea cannot apply to the Media which brought the issue of rotting of foodgrain to public attention and virtually put the government in the dock for criminal wastage of grains in its warehouses. Policy deficiencies are clearly...

Television and print Media have been awash with pictures of stacks of sacks of rotting foodgrain. And played in an almost infinite loop, these pictures become obviously powerful. They can become a call to urgent and revolutionary action. This perhaps accounts for the emotive appeal of the Supreme Court’s recent intervention on distributing this grain, and to keep procurement commensurate with available storage facilities. It does not, however, explain the...