The Prime Minister’s Independence Day address to the nation was particularly disappointing this year. The Prime Minister has said, yet again, that "the country needs another Green Revolution". But what’s distressing is that his government has not even formulated a draft strategy for such a revolution in the last five years, let alone launch it. Why? Largely because the agriculture minister has not shown the slightest interest in a "Second...

Crop scientist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug, an enduring icon for the war on hunger who had helped steer India away from recurrent famines towards self-sufficiency in food, died on Saturday. Borlaug, whose research to improve wheat varieties, initiated in Mexico in 1945, led to the Green Revolution and helped save millions of people from Starvation worldwide, died from cancer complications in Texas. He was 95. M.S. Swaminathan,...

The time has come for a comprehensive right-to-food law to tackle the deprivation and food insecurity that haunts India.  Over the last decade or so, a series of developments have drawn attention to the problem of food security. These are the persistence of hunger in many parts of the country being juxtaposed with food surpluses and stocks; the adverse impact of globalisation on agriculture and rising food prices resulting in...

A food security law will be meaningful only if it is based on universal food provision and ensures that every citizen’s nutritional needs are met. At an outlet of the public distribution system in Erode, Tamil Nadu. States such as Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh have defined BPL in such an inclusive way that the vast majority of the population is included, which makes their food distribution schemes...

  Civil Society activists and assorted rural experts are anxious that soon-to-be-launched Right to Food Bill might slip from its ambitious goal of nutrition security for all to a trite tokenism. The main worry is that cumulative effect of all the clauses, sub-clauses and small print must not stop short of making food available everywhere at all times so that no citizen sleeps hungry. The worry is on many counts. The...