THE NATIONAL Advisory Council ( NAC) headed by UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi has scored its first victory — a change in the proposed Food Security Bill that raises the monthly allocation of foodgrains to the poor from 25 kg to 35 kg at Rs 3 a kilo. The draft Bill, approved by the empowered group of ministers ( EGoM) recently, had offered 25 kg of foodgrains to those below the poverty...

Judging by the television news that night, May 20, 2010, was a day like any other — marked by natural disaster (a cyclone predicted for Orissa), violent rebellion (the blowing up of railway tracks by Maoists in Bihar), political partisanship (the insistence by Mamata Banerjee that the Union railways minister would be of her party even if she soon moved, as she hoped, to become chief minister of West Bengal),...

‘Beggar type.’ Like most of us, Smita Jacob had never come across that pithy official phrase before. It’s a classification in the records of the police of New Delhi, India’s richest city, used to describe a dead homeless person whose death is too insignificant to investigate. The police are as sensitive as you and I to the cripple on the pavement, the child at the car window. They mean no...

India has opposed suggestions that countries that have cap-and-trade schemes to control carbon emissions—mostly developed countries—impose a carbon tax on imports from nations that don’t have such measures in place, made at the ongoing global climate talks in Bonn. “The matter of any unilateral trade measure on imports in the name of climate action raises some concerns regarding the success of our discussions,” Vijay Sharma, secretary, ministry of environment and forests,...

vineyard owners of Maharashtra who export grapes are worried. The Euro-pean Union rejected their table grape consignments in mid-April as they were found containing traces of chlormequat chloride, a plant growth regulator. The export of table grapes (these are consumed directly unlike grapes that go into wine making) was halted immediately. The farmers are facing losses of about Rs 300 crore, media reported. “My son-in-law had exported two containers (30...