-The Business Standard   Latest HDR a poor report card for India The good news from the Human Development Report, or HDR, for 2011 is that India’s rank – 134 out of 187 – has remained unchanged. If we look at countries relevant to India – fellow BRICS members (Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa) and India’s neighbours (Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) – four have held their positions and three countries have...

-EPW   The media noise shed little light on the important issues involved in deciding the coverage of welfare programmes. The context for the Planning Commission’s (PC) affidavit on the official poverty line was the deliberation in the Supreme Court on how many people could be covered by the public distribution system (PDS). But while the sound and fury over the poverty line – Rs 32 per capita per day in the urban...

With institutional healthcare being prohibitively expensive, more women in rural India are choosing to deliver at home than in hospitals and healthcare facilities, says a new report brought out by Chittorgarh-based NGO, Prayas, in partnership with Oxfam India. The 'Study of the trends in out-of-pocket payments in healthcare during National Rural Health Mission period (2005-2010)', released on October 12 in the national capital, was conducted across five Indian states - Assam,...

In the gathering gloom of slowing growth and political drift, comes some good news to brighten up the festival season. The latest Human Development Report, released today, shows that “inclusive growth” — the mantra of the entire political establishment — may not be just a mere slogan. Socially and economically weaker sections, like Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Muslims, are finally catching up with the rest of the country on important...

Today is the ''International Day for the Eradication of Poverty'', so it an appropriate day to note how necessary it still is to emphasise this concern among Indian policy makers. Sadly, lack of official awareness is evident in all sorts of recent policy measures, for example in the cynicism of increasing oil prices that feed into all other prices with cascading effects, even when inflation has already imposed huge burdens on...