For long, economists have argued among themselves whether income should be the only criterion for measuring poverty. After all, in real life a person can face multiple deprivations, say, in terms of access to education, health and living standards, among others. The multidimensional poverty index (MPI), which offers a valuable complement to traditional income-based poverty measures, was first introduced in the 2010 Human Development Report (HDR). The MPI looks at...

-ThePrint.inThe idea that all public initiatives to improve well-being are failing or dispensable is evidently wrong.In recent years, a debate has raged in India on what is the level of poverty in the country and whether it has changed, either to reflect the arrival of a new India or the persistence of an old one. Prime Minister Narendra Modi?s government stopped producing official estimates of poverty when it abolished the...

-The Hindu The CEO of the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana on the challenges and scope of the scheme and responses from the States Indu Bhushan is the CEO of the world’s largest government-funded health insurance scheme, the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY), which was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on September 23. Until his appointment as CEO of PM-JAY, Mr. Bhushan served as director general for the East Asia...

-The Hindu Business Line How malnourished tribal adults come to have the ‘rich man’s disease’ About 50 km from Bilaspur town, a narrow road to the left leads to the Achanakmar Tiger Reserve in neighbouring Lormi district of Chhattisgarh. The Reserve is also home to 13,568 tribals in 40 hamlets inside the protected area. As one ventures deeper into the jungles, paintings across walls of tribals’ homes hailing Chief Minister Raman Singh’s benevolence...

-TheWire.in Most of the ‘reforms’ that are being introduced to address poor delivery of social services are silent on the issue of inadequate human resources, among other shortfalls in capacity. The poor performance of the public sector especially in education, health and other social services has been the subject of a lot of debates in the last few decades. The dominant narrative has attributed implementation failures to corruption, lack of accountability, poor...