-The Hindu The currencies of India, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa and Turkey have fallen quite dramatically against the dollar in the past few months. Whatever their domestic weaknesses, the reasons for this unprecedented decline - ranging between 13 to 21 per cent - are primarily global. In the past 48 hours, as tension mounts in West Asia, an already unprecedented situation has become even more difficult. On Wednesday, the rupee, as...

-IANS The land acquisition bill was on Thursday tabled in the Lok Sabha amidst chaos with the opposition parties demanding a statement from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the depreciation of the rupee against the dollar. As the house resumed following an hour-long adjournment, Union rural Development minister Jairam Ramesh introduced the land acquisition and rehabilitation bill to be taken up for consideration. The members of various political parties continued demanding that the...

-PTI GWALIOR: Rural Development Ministry would join hands with a leading defence research organisation to push eco-friendly bio-toilets in villages in four states where the menace of open defecation remained unaddressed. Impressed by the achievement of the Defence Research and Development Establishment (DRDE) in developing low cost bio-toilets, Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh today said that members of Women Self Help Groups from Bihar, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh would be...

-Down to Earth Our policy makers should move away from the income criterion for estimating poverty and take cognisance of other indicators Amid mounting criticism and heated debates about the poverty line, a challenge has resurfaced to examine whether there could be a single non-monetary criterion of estimating poverty. A poverty line is a monetary cut-off point below which a person is deemed to be poor. Thus, any attempt to measure poverty...

-Economic and Political Weekly The government has notified a Draft Land Reforms Policy which, on paper, has all the requisites of an earnest programme. Yet, the near total failure of earlier efforts at land reforms in India leave little room for hope that something substantial will at last be done to combat landlessness. Harsh Mander (manderharsh@gmail.com) is with the Centre for Equity Studies, New Delhi, and works with survivors of mass violence,...