-The Guardian In a village in India's poorest state, Bihar, farmers are growing world record amounts of rice – with no GM, and no herbicide. Is this one solution to world food shortages? Sumant Kumar was overjoyed when he harvested his rice last year. There had been good rains in his village of Darveshpura in north-east India and he knew he could improve on the four or five tonnes per hectare that he usually...

-Economic and Political Weekly The proposed legislation on the National Food Security Act has been steadily watered down since it was fi rst mooted in 2009. The Parliamentary Standing Committee that examined the 2011 Bill has disappointingly continued with "targeting". If the government passes the bill incorporating the committee's suggestions, a historic opportunity to combat hunger and malnutrition would be lost. Ankita Aggarwal (aggarwal.ankita87@gmail.com) is a Research Scholar at the Centre for...

-The Hindu Hyderabad: An anti-poverty project to transform the lives of ultra poor families has failed to make an impact and increase the net income of the targeted families in Medak district in the State at the end of four years. The project sponsored by the World Bank and the Ford Foundation was aimed at graduating 426 households from extreme poverty to a more stable state by enabling them establish micro-enterprises through...

-The Times of India HYDERABAD: The UPA government's petprogramme - the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) - may have been started with the objective of securing the livelihood of the residents of rural India by providing assured employment for 100 days in a year, but has ended up choking the entrepreneurial spirit in the hinterlands ofAndhra Pradesh. These are the findings of a study conducted by a faculty of...

-Business Today What does the proposed food security law mean for the government's finances? Most days, around half a dozen middleaged men in Tamil Nadu's Nemam village head for a slushy pond. They are farm labourers who have had little work for the past few months because of a drought in their Tiruvarur district. As an alternative they catch fish, but the income from it is not enough to survive on. "But...