Statistics can abet illusions, unless properly understood and used. The debates on poverty line and budget deficits reflect a lack of understanding of the meaning and purpose of these measures. India has been recently witness to furious debates on measures of poverty and budget deficits. Any measure can be used only for the purpose it is designed for. The debates in the present cases were furious, because preconceptions and emotions were...

I have never been to Brazil's "beautiful horizon", Belo Horizonte, the country's third-largest metropolitan area and an information and bio-technology hub, but I have followed the city's progress against what was once its enduring shame: hunger. In 1993, when 11% of its 2.5 million people lived in absolute poverty and a fifth of Belo's children went hungry, a newly-elected government declared that food was a fundamental right of every citizen,...

-Live Mint   No other social sector programme has been criticized for being successful as has the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). So much so that it is not the inefficiency of the MGNREGS that is a problem, but its success that is seen as the reason for several problems facing the country. Even though it is still a small programme with annual spending of less than Rs.35,000 crore,...

An unnecessary controversy has been started by the release of the poverty estimates of 2009-10 by the planning commission. The controversy, which was entirely avoidable, was allowed to go on because of the poor handling of the issue by the planning commission. It is unfortunate that the planning commission was less than willing to own the Tendulkar committee report which was submitted in December 2009 and accepted by the commission...

Each time 25 year old Salma takes her one year old son Zubair to the Batla Clinic (a private clinic in Delhi) for a shot of the DPT, the cost of transportation and the vaccine adds up to approximately Rs.500.   When it is time for Zubair to take the next immunization dose, Salma may find that the expenses have entirely spiraled out of her reach. New vaccines and expensive brands of baby...