This paper examines the relationship between per capita cereal consumption and per capita income in India using the India Human Development Survey 2004-05. It turns out that per capita cereal consumption remains much the same at different levels of per capita income, though it does vary substantially with education levels, household size, occupation patterns and urbanisation. The recent decline of cereal consumption over time may reflect changes in these non-income factors. While cereal consumption seems unrelated to per capita income, it is positively related to per capita expenditure.

This analysis examines what the ubiquitous presence of political “brokers” who mediate many people’s access to state institutions reveals about the Indian state and the complex causes of corruption in Indian public life. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bihar since 2002, it reveals the role of brokers within both village power relations and the larger political system.

This article presents an investigation into strategies employed by privately-owned companies to gain access to land for resource extraction in Jharkhand where much of the land being put under the shovel is inalienable adivasi or tribal land and deedless commons. It concludes that although policy reforms are welcome, cosmetic changes in mineral governance laws are inadequate to protect the interests of the poor. It suggests an alternative vision, a complete overhaul of mineral ownership to allow the poor to share the revenue benefits.

There is not just a crisis of development today, but also a crisis of ideas for emancipatory forms of development. What is needed from progressives is a rigorous theory that must acknowledge what is present (class exploitation, imperialism, national and social oppression, profit-driven ecological destruction, gross commercialisation of all spheres of human life including culture and social relations) but also what is absent (collective democratic control over our lives, our planet, our bodies, our destiny, our culture).

The Common Service Centre scheme aims to establish nearly three lakh rural internet kiosks across India. A recent evaluation study, however, found poor demand among users and delayed roll-out of government-to-consumer services, causing losses and attrition among private operators of the scheme. There is space, therefore, for greater engineering of public good outcomes by tying financial incentives to computer education goals.

The quality of implementation of the National Rural Health Mission in a number of states has transformed the public healthcare system considerably. Learning from these improvements which have focused on the grass roots, local recruitment is the best way to forge a credible public health system that has public accountability.

The recommendations of the Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Access to Universal Healthcare are significant because they make explicit the need to contextualise health within the rights. However, the problem with the report is that it does not ask why many of the same recommendations that were made by previous committees have not been implemented. The HLEG neither recognises the problems, constraints and compulsions at the national, state and district levels nor offers any solutions on how to deal with them.

The laws are ineffectual, the facilities are inadequate and hazardous wastes continue to pile up. (Editorial)

Utsa Patnaik’s new critique of our work on food and nutrition is wholly unconvincing. Her analysis of international patterns of “total” cereal consumption, interesting as it may be, does not invalidate anything we wrote, and certainly does not indict us of any “fallacies”. And her attempt to demonstrate that the decline of cereal intake in India reflects “severe demand-deflation for the majority of the population” is based on a circular argument.

Continuing the debate on the Deaton and Dreze analysis of food and nutrition in India, it is argued that the latter’s analysis is defective because (i) it does not look at direct and indirect cereal consumption when examining the relationship between cereal intake and income, and (ii) it is fallacious to reason that the declining cereal consumption reflects a diversification of diets. It is also pointed out that the Deaton-Dreze critical response to the use of “direct poverty lines” is misplaced.