EVERY OTHER day there is either a newspaper report or an editorial comment lamenting the loss of food grain stored in buffer stocks. Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, while prophesying a bumper kharif crop, admits he is worried about not having adequate storage for the produce. At a national conference in 2003, the Central Warehousing Corporation said it had covered storage capacity for 48 million tonnes of food grain. In 2002,...

Wheat prices have staged the most drastic rise in more than 50 years, as a drought in Russia fuels growing worries that it could lead to a global shortage of the grain. Harsh heat and a lack of rain in Russia have killed half of the crop in some hard-hit areas. The slump in production in one of the world's most fertile breadbaskets has pushed prices up 62% since early June,...

Plagued by power shortage but determined to find a way out, 10 villages in Karnataka have switched to solar power. Kerosene lamps and ‘chullahs’ are now things of the past. Anitha Pailoor documents this journey from darkness to light.d to light It’s half past eight in a tiny village called Neeralakatti, 15 km from Dharwad where Mangala is sitting at home, busy grading farm-picked brinjals as she has to send...

The government owes crores of rupees to workers under its flagship rural jobs scheme as wages for April and May, even though payment is not supposed to be delayed by more than a fortnight. Wage payments of Rs283 crore are due for the first two months of the ongoing fiscal under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, according to data available with the rural development ministry, which oversees the...

There's not much you can buy in terms of assets for Rs 1 lakh. But two Delhi businessmen gained access to a multi-crore iron ore mine in Chhattisgarh for just this much. On June 2, 2004, two brothers, Atul Jain and Sanjay Jain, pooled together Rs 1 lakh in Delhi to set up a company, Pushp Steel and Mines Ltd. The same day, the company applied for a prospecting licence...