Breakthroughs in the production and productivity of wheat and rice in the sixties and of cotton recently have been much appreciated, but similar advances in maize have gone largely unnoticed and unsung. Maize output has soared in the past 10 years from a mere 12 million tonnes in 2000-01 to over 21 million tonnes in 2010-11. This increase can largely be attributed to a surge in crop productivity rather than...

A perverse, yet novel reason put forward to explain high inflation is that the poor are eating more as they are becoming less poor. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has been extolled for being responsible for higher consumption, which in a way is a vindication of high inflation. The extended logic used here is that if the poor are eating more and we are paying high...

In his fields, Badhia Naval Singh , a farmer tilling 8 bighas of land in the Bagli tehsil in Madhya Pradesh, has been seeing something strange for a while now. Earlier, if he pulled out a tuft of grass, he would see earthworms . "Ab woh dikhna bandh ho gaye hain (they don't show up any longer)," says the 45-yearold . Also, he says, when he ploughed earlier, the soil...

“This war is between a small minority of exploiters and toiling masses” The Maoists have promised to “rehabilitate” all Special Police Officers (SPOs) in Chhattisgarh who sever all connections with the State machinery and return to their villages, according to a signed press release dated July 7. The Communist Party of India (Maoist) release was issued in the backdrop of a July 5 Supreme Court ruling that the use of armed SPOs...

A Supreme Court bench comprising Justices Sudershan Reddy and Surinder Singh Nijjar passed orders in two politically sensitive cases this week.These orders have caused much controversy over the role of judiciary in constitutional cases. In the first of the two cases, Nandini Sundar v State of Chattisgarh, the judges held that the armed deployment of ill-trained, uneducated and poor tribal youths in combat operations against Naxals by appointing them as...