Jharkhand’s implementation of the Centre’s flagship scheme to grant land rights to forest dwellers has been Extremely Poor, ringing hollow promises by successive governments to uphold rights of over three lakh tribals of the state. According to a report prepared by a 19-member committee constituted by the Union ministry of environment and forests, 24 districts of Jharkhand had granted land rights to a mere 7,207 forest dwellers under Scheduled Tribes and...

Suffering from extreme poverty and male oppression, the women of Darkali village in Madhya Pradesh, India, are now able to feed their families through employment under the MGNREGS. The wages obtained under the Scheme help them augment the family resource base. Jashmabai is working under the punishing sun on an earthen dam in her village of Darkali, in Madhya Pradesh's Alirajpur district, being built under the government-funded Mahatma Gandhi National Rural...

The National Advisory Council's move to restrict universalisation of the PDS to the most disadvantaged districts may ultimately end up limiting its impact. RECENT weeks have seen rather contradictory statements on the challenge of ensuring food security and the set of feasible initiatives for managing the food economy. To start with, the National Advisory Council (NAC), which recognises the need for a universal public distribution system (PDS), and which was expected to...

Continuing with the “well-entrenched trend of corruption and mismanagement” in foodgrain procurement and storage, the food bowl of India- Punjab - this year, too, procured wheat that was highly substandard and damaged. This has been admitted by none other than Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, who recently said in Parliament that as many as 244 bags of wheat procured by Punjab State Civil Supplies Corporation (PUNSUP) on behalf of the Food Corporation...

Orissa government to save Rs 40 crore by cancelling them THE Orissa government has cancelled over 88,000 bogus ration cards detected during a two-and-a-half-month drive by the state’s food supplies department. Sources said more than 68,000 of the ghost cards detected in 27 of Orissa’s 30 districts between November 2009 and January this year belonged to the Below Poverty Line (BPL) category; 9,877 such cards were under the Antyodyaya scheme aimed to...