-Frontline Professor Sukhpal Singh, a faculty member of the Centre for Management of Agriculture at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, has been researching and documenting the process of contract farming and food supply chains in India for more than a decade. He is of the view that the small farmer is being excluded in the method currently in place, which defeats the very purpose of improving Indian agriculture. Sukhpal Singh,...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: After the ambitious food security law, the UPA government is preparing another populist scheme to expand the supply of subsidised edible oil and pulses through the countrywide network of ration shops in the next two to three months. "It will be the next major thing. We are working at the earliest. We propose that state governments purchase pulses and edible oil either through imports or locally. We...

-Live Mint Debates on malnutrition ignore links with sanitation and disease and the burdens these impose on children Children in India are among the shortest in the world. Widespread child stunting is a human development tragedy. This is not because there is anything wrong with being short or anything inherently good about being tall. The tragedy is because of what makes children short: we all have different genetic potential heights, but...

-The Hindu     The Kerala government has not learnt anything from the Attappady tragedy. Nutrition levels of women and children, most of them tribals, continue to remain dismal in the area At the Agali Community Health Centre in Attappady, Palakkad district, Kerala, Kavitha tends to her four-year-old child lying listlessly on the cot, critically ill. The doctor says the child is severely malnourished. He also says there are eight such infants and children,...

-Frontline     Attempts by the Congress-led UPA government to adopt the ordinance route to pass the Food Security Bill fail as the opposition parties are more or less united in seeking a Bill that provides universal PDS coverage. THE National Food Security Bill (NFSB), 2013, touted as the biggest game changer for the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in the 2014 parliamentary elections, will go through yet another round of discussions...