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This paper aims to provide a situated critical discourse analysis of the public debate around India’s 2013 National Food Security Act (NFSA), describing its rhetorical characteristics and the context within which it has taken place.

Using Wodak’s (2001) Discourse Historical Approach (DHA), the authors examine media coverage of the NFSA, attending to perspectivization, intensification and mitigation and representational and argumentational strategies. The authors also consider this coverage in light of its intratextual, intertextual, situational and wider socio-political and economic contexts. The corpus consists of 29 English-language Indian newspaper and magazine articles, published in print and online between 2011 and 2014.

This paper explains the rhetorical purchase of the term “food security” in contemporary Indian public policy debates by comparing the leftist, right wing and centrist arguments.

Owing to the detailed qualitative analysis presented here, the corpus is necessarily limited in size. Newspaper articles contributed by one of the authors were omitted from the study.

The DHA claims to be an interdisciplinary framework, but relatively few studies involve true cross-disciplinary research. By contrast, this study relies on close collaboration by scholars active in economics and applied linguistics – thus, demonstrating both the potential for, and the value of, working coherently across academic disciplines. Also, unlike most DHA studies, which interrogate dominant discourses, this paper compares diverse discourses competing for influence.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) on farm sector wage rate. This identification strategy rests on the assumption that all districts across India would have had similar wage trends in the absence of the program. The author argues that this assumption may not be true due to non-random allocation of districts to the program’s three phases across states and different economic growth paths of the states post the implementation of NREGS.

To control for overall macroeconomic trends, the author allows for state-level time fixed effects to capture the differences in growth trajectories across districts due to changing economic landscape in the parent-state over time. The author also estimates the expected farm sector wage growth due to the increased public work employment provision using a theoretical model.

The results, contrary to the existing studies, do not find support for a significantly positive impact of NREGS treatment on private cultivation wage rate. The theoretical model also shows that an increase in public employment work days explains very little of the total growth in cultivation wage post 2004.

This paper looks specifically at farm sector wage growth and the possible impact of NREGS on it, accounting for state specific factors in shaping farm wages. Theoretical estimates are presented to overcome econometric limitations.

The objective of this paper was twofold-revisiting the in-kind public distribution system (PDS) – India's flagship food security intervention and seeking beneficiary perspectives on its efficacy. The feasibility of cash transfers as an alternative mechanism is also examined, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Primary and secondary data from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu were used. In-depth interviews with beneficiaries using phenomenology were conducted to evaluate their perception and willingness to shift to a cash-based PDS in the pre and post-pandemic periods. Secondary district-level data were also used to ascertain institutional preparedness for this shift.

In-depth interviews of 105 beneficiaries revealed valuable insights, which seem to have significantly changed post-pandemic. Beneficiaries in the post-pandemic period seem much more inclined toward cash transfers, though a combination of cash plus in-kind benefits seems to be strongly preferred. Secondary results pointed out to the lack of institutional preparedness in financial inclusion. The research suggested that while the existing PDS needs to be overhauled, policymakers should look at a model of cash plus in-kind transfers as a probable alternative to pure cash transfers.

There is a dearth of in-depth state-specific studies on beneficiary perception of PDS, and this is important since the economic and sociocultural milieu in each region is unique. Being the only state with universal food security, its experience could yield important insights for other states or even middle or low-income countries similar to India.