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Tag Search: “food security”

Local political elite capture and BPL card allocation

There is significant anecdotal evidence for the fact that local political connections at the grassroots level is an important channel through which leakages take place in welfare schemes in India such...

  • Articles

Can microcredit improve food security among the rural poor?

A core objective of microcredit in Bangladesh is to make the rural poor more food secure. To what extent has this been achieved? Analysing household data from Bangladesh, this column finds that parti...

  • Articles

Using science to improve Indian agriculture

Five years ago, the Indian government imposed a ‘temporary’ moratorium on the commercial release of Bt brinjal – a genetically modified crop - even after it had passed through the due regulatory proc...

  • Perspectives

The Chhattisgarh experience and the National Food Security Act

Many of the reforms introduced under the National Food Security Act are modeled on PDS reforms implemented in Chhattisgarh. These reforms are widely believed to be responsible for the state’s success...

  • Articles

Workfare as an effective way to fight poverty: The case of India's MNREGA

The fundamental appeal of a workfare programme, vis-à-vis a welfare programme, is that it helps in targeting the beneficiaries. This column assesses the welfare impact of MNREGA on poor rural househo...

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Saving people's livelihoods

The new government is seeking to alter the essence of MNREGA based on the premise that it is not useful in its current form. In this article, Sudha Narayanan criticises the move and argues that despi...

  • Perspectives

Protectionism under the guise of food security

India has backed out of the commitment it made at the WTO negotiations in Bali in November 2013. The implicit explanation is that the government needs to accumulate food grain stocks to provide subsid...

  • Perspectives

The Jaitley Budget: Planning for crisis

El Nino can potentially derail the best-laid plans of the new government in India. The article contends that the finance minister would do well to plan his first Budget by attaching a reasonable prob...

  • Perspectives

Reconstructing facts in Bt cotton: Why scepticism fails

In disputes around Bt cotton, a “triumph narrative” is alleged to have emerged from researchers - mainly economists - catering to vested interests of the biotech industry, its funding and allied journ...

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Incorporating Public Good Availability into the Measure of Poverty

This project makes an attempt to incorporate benefits from unpaid public services into consumption decisions to arrive at more accurate measures of poverty and inequality. The project considered thre...

  • IGC Research on India

Right to Food: Let's get it right

The proposed inter-state resource allocation in the upcoming National Food Security Bill is anti-poor. It will result in unequal treatment of equally poor individuals across rich and poor states. This...

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