The Planning Commission’s latest affidavit to the Supreme Court in the right to food case reveals it has not taken the court’s advice to revise the thresholds and spending that determine the poverty line, although the commission admits to spiralling food costs and inflation. The affidavit was filed in a public interest litigation being pursued by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, which wants the government’s threshold of Rs. 12 and...

Planning Commission, RBI officials hold brainstorming deliberations with experts With the persistent near double-digit headline inflation, despite sustained increases in key policy rates by the Reserve Bank of India, turning out to be “a frustrating experience for policymakers,” senior officials from the Planning Commission, the Finance Ministry and the RBI met with a group of academic economic experts and representatives of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the...

A survey conducted across nine states by the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and Allahabad University suggests that the much maligned system has revived, prodded by politics, good governance and the apex court. It also found the poor to be averse to cash transfers Kotri is a mid-sized village in Desuri block (Pali district, Rajasthan), about 15 kilometres away from the nearest large bus stand and market place. We walked to...

-The Business Standard   Demand-side control cannot be an answer beyond a point to India’s persistently high food price inflation, the World Bank said on Monday. Consumer price-based food inflation in India has been at 10-20 per cent for quite a long while, noted its report on ‘Food inflation in South Asia’. The Bank’s chief economist for the region, Kalpana Kochhar, said controlling inflation in India was a difficult job for the Reserve Bank...

The flawed Bill on food security has not received the kind of publicity that the Lokpal Bill has, but that does not diminish its significance. “THIS government has divided everything and everyone. There are different cards for different sections of the poor. If my employer, taking pity on me, gives me an old television, I am not entitled to a yellow card [Below Poverty Line card]. My son who is...