Grains of doubt

UNION Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh has rejected the food ministry’s suggestion that 25 per cent of wages under the rural employment guarantee programme be paid in foodgrains.

How rural kitchen pays

Letters - March 15, 2012

Puranas as sci-fi

Hidden hunger?

Andhra Pradesh Foods, a state government enterprise, is ramping up its fortified food production capacity. It provides ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook foods like upma mix, sweet porridge and khichdi mix, fortified with iron, zinc and other vitamins, to infants and pregnant and lactating women under the Centre’s Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS).

Difficult to digest

Unravelling the food mess

Across Navargaon village in Korchi tehsil of Maharashtra’s Gadchiroli district one can see wheat spread out to sun on cots outside every home. The wheat is worm infested and Bhimabai Katenge, one of the residents, holds up a handful to show that the grains are nearly hollow. “This is the grain we have received after two months. When we asked the ration shop dealer about the last two months’ supply, he said it has lapsed.”

Low Pulse

Surendra Nath has switched to eating grass-pea, though he knows it is not good for health. But so is tobacco, he argues. He cannot do without pulses and pigeon-pea selling at Rs 100 a kg is beyond his means. The 45-year-old electrician-cum-security-in-charge at a housing society in  

Empty Promises

As soaring food prices threatened to push 100 million more people into starvation, heads and representatives of 180 countries gathered in Rome in the first week of June to find ways to overcome the crisis. The situation was extraordinary--global food prices have almost doubled in three years and the Food and Agriculture Organization (fao) predicts the trend is not going to ease in the short term because global grain supplies are at their lowest since the 1980s.

Global food crisis: causes and implications for India

  Africa

India must focus on rainfed farming