The Bengal famine of 1943 is arguably the worst economic disaster of 20th century south Asia. This paper traces the background of the famine and analyses the role of the land market in fuelling food price rise. It appears that in a monetised, already famished, agrarian economy, during situations of subsistence crisis, interlinking of food and land markets has the potential to cause an exponentially high degree of disaster. The role of a universal public distribution system, which carries over food from a surplus to a deficit year, and insulates the food market, thus becomes paramount.

This article utilises the National Family Health Survey-3 data and presents an empirical assessment of income-related health inequality in India. It undertakes a state-level analysis of inequities in child health by employing the widely accepted measures of concentration curves and concentration indices. It finds that the poorer sections of the population are beleaguered with ill health whether in the quest for child survival or due to anxieties pertaining to child nutrition.

This article examines the performance of the National Rural Employment Guarantee programme since its launch in mid-2005. It first provides a summary of progress in certain areas and then highlights specific weaknesses. Finally, it describes the challenges that lie ahead and suggests how these can be overcome.

There is no standing national database on panchayat finances in India, which limits any meaningful analysis of the revenue effort of panchayats. Based on a field survey in the four states of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Orissa, this paper studies the own revenue effort of rural local bodies within their statutorily defined revenue rights. The study finds that the assigned tax rights are not fully utilised by the panchayats and non-tax revenue is the dominant source of their own revenue.

While the headcount index of poverty in India has fallen, per capita cereal consumption and calorie intake have also decreased. At the poverty line, the minimum calorie requirements used for defining this line in the base year are not being met in later years. While the official poverty line used the food requirement norm from nutrition science, this paper employs the food consumption requirement derived from the Engel curve as the norm to arrive at a measure of food consumption deprivation.

Despite a number of breaches in the Narmada main canal over the years, command area ecological concerns are simply not being paid enough attention by the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam.

The origins of the conflagration in June in Kashmir on forest land allocation for construction of facilities for the Amarnath yatra lie in open state promotion of the pilgrimage. The yatra has caused considerable damage to the economy and ecology of the area. The high-handed actions of the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board only aggravated the situation.

Tapas Soren, a tribal of Birakhap in Jharkhand, committed self-immolation recently, impoverished by the constant demand for bribes by local officials for work done under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. His death soon after the murder of Lalit Mehta who had exposed corruption in NREGA schemes in Palamu is a damning comment on how the scheme is being implemented in Jharkhand.

Built on the logic of "development', big dams have wreaked havoc on indigenous communities in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh with regular flooding. By pursuing predatory development the central and state governments are equally culpable of visiting disaster on the region.

The Hokkaido communique on climate change of the Group of Eight countries does not lay down targets for emissions reductions in the developed countries. Yet the G-8 asks developing countries to take more meaningful mitigation actions. How does India