-The Times of India With the state budget all set to be presented on July 12, TOI takes a hard look at the government's cheap rice scheme and its impact on politics and employment. Will cheap rice boil? Let's look at the math. Reducing the price from Rs 3 to Re 1 per kg will help a family save Rs 60 per month. Till now, poor families got rice from the Public Distribution...

-The Hindu There has to be a national mission to ensure that rural homes have access to clean cooking fuel and stoves instead of the killer chulhas that are claiming the lives of large numbers of women A large section of our country's population, nearly 75 per cent of rural and 22 per cent of urban households, still uses biomass for daily cooking. An estimated 80 per cent of the residential energy...

-Outlook As the Manmohan Singh government makes evident its unfriendliness to villages, the nation hurtles towards disaster. It's a danger no one wants to face. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been trying for years to make us believe that agriculture is a vast marshland in which a huge population is stuck ankle- to neck-deep and it is his duty to rescue them. "Our salvation lies in moving people out of agriculture," he...

-Live Mint The fundamental pathology of Indian policy is the overwhelming preference for subsidies over public goods One useful way to understand a fundamental flaw in policymaking in India since 2004 is to ask a rhetorical question: why is the ruling United Progressive Alliance aggressively pushing for a law guaranteeing the right to food rather than one for the right to clean drinking water? Take a look at the numbers. A February...

-PTI NEW DELHI: The government plans to convene a special session of Parliament for passage of the Food Security Bill as a divided Cabinet on Thursday shunned the idea of promulgating an ordinance to implement the watershed legislation. A meeting of the Cabinet could not arrive at a decision on bringing an ordinance to implement the UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi's pet programme and instead decided to court opposition parties for passage of...