-Press note from Right to Food Campaign, Jharkhand   Etwariya Devi, a 67-year-old widow, died of hunger and exhaustion on 25 December in Sonpurwa village of Majhiaon block of Garhwa district (Jharkhand). She lived with her son Ghura Vishwakarma, daughter-in-law Usha Devi and their three children in a dilapidated kutcha house. The family has a hand-to-mouth existence and is routinely unable to access adequate nutrition. Surviving the day on only a meal...

-Down to Earth India needs to find a permanent solution to the problem of public stock holding, as it is a matter of survival for hundreds of millions people During the negotiations for WTO Agreement on Agriculture in 2001, India raised concerns over food security and flexibility that developing nations must have when it comes to providing subsidies to key farm inputs. Seventeen years have passed since then and countries like...

-The Pioneer Raipur: The Chhattisgarh State Civil Supplies Corporation’s (CGSCSC) distribution centre module is now implemented at 120 warehouses of 108 distribution centres in the State, officials informed. The stocks and sales figures of previous month of all the Fair Price Shops (FPSs) are entered into this module and the actual amount of PDS commodities to be issued to FPS is calculated by this web based software and delivery order and truck...

-The Hindu Business Line Procurement of the excess output vis-a-vis a normal year, rather than open-ended purchase, is a viable option A bountiful harvest that implies an increase in output may not always increase the nominal income of the farming sector, which is subject to the behaviour of input and more particularly output prices, which may sometimes move sharply. There can, therefore, be years in which there is a sudden and sharp...

-Down to Earth Jean Dreze argues that we should not leave the making of an equitable society to experts alone What does one make of the shameful statistic that over 200 million Indians still subsist below the poverty line? How does one square it with the equally obscene distinction that we have the world’s fourth largest number of billionaires, thus making India the second most unequal nation after Russia? Indeed, how...