Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday approved the final draft food security bill. The bill, when passed, will provide cheaper foodgrain to 75% of the population, or 900 million Indians. This is much higher than what a PM-appointed panel recommended, but is lower than the 90% coverage sought by the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC). To cover 90% of the population under a food law, the Centre will have to...
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Ending Indifference: A Law to Exile Hunger? by Harsh Mander
Can we agree in this country on a floor of human dignity below which we will not allow any human being to fall? No child, woman or man in this land will sleep hungry. No person shall be forced to sleep under the open sky. No parent shall send their child out to work instead of to school. And no one shall die because they cannot afford the cost of...
More »Parliamentary Committee questions move to introduce Food Bill
-The Economic Times The Parliamentary Standing Committee on finance has questioned the government's move to introduce a right to food bill when it did not have a single, widely-accepted definition of the poor. The "criteria of identification of the poor remains nebulous," the Yashwant Sinha-headed committee has observed. The proposed food security bill, seen as the largest such legislation anywhere in the world, hinges on the definition of the poor. The...
More »Suresh Tendulkar, eminent economist, passes away by Ashok Dasgupta
He played a significant role in framing economic policy He estimated that every third Indian is living in poverty Did extensive work on credit and privatisation policies With the demise of Suresh Tendulkar at the age of 72 following a cardiac arrest in Pune on Tuesday, the country has lost yet another eminent economist who played a significant part in moulding the government's economic policy making. A Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and...
More »Undermining people’s power - A story of five years by Nikhil Dey
More than five years have passed since the world’s largest employment programme was launched in India. The scale of employment generated was not the only reason that this is a path breaking legislation. The MGNREGA is the first national law to establish rights in the development sector. It is demand based, and not constrained by arbitrary and restrictive selections like the Below Poverty Line (BPL) list. Any person living in a...
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