Statistical poverty lines should not become real-life eligibility criteria for food entitlements.  Nothing is easier than to recognise a poor person when you see him or her. Yet the task of identifying and counting the poor seems to elude the country's best experts. Take for instance the “headcount” of rural poverty — the proportion of the rural population below the poverty line. At least four alternative figures are available: 28...

Nearly 2 lakh farmers committed suicide in India since 1997. The share of big five states accounted for 1,22,823 suicides in this 12 year period. The data compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau points out that 16,196 farmers in India ended their life in 2008. K Nagaraj, an economist, in his report Farmers' suicides in India: Magnitude, Trends and Spatial Patterns, says, "The title to land was taken as the...

After the suspicion and hostility of a few held up the introduction of Bt brinjal, the prime minister’s economic advisory council has stepped in to provide some good sense. In the context of Bt cotton’s success, the council recommended farm evaluations and a comprehensive risk analysis of GM crops, the results of which should be brought into the public domain as soon as possible. In India, the Bt brinjal case...

Monica Das Gupta is a senior social scientist at the World Bank. Her field research in Punjab, when she was at the National Council of Applied Economic Research, established that sex differentials in child mortality in rural Punjab persisted despite relative wealth, socio-economic development including rapid universalization of female education, fertility decline, and mortality decline. Amartya Sen’s writings drew attention to female foeticide and infanticide in Asia that led to...

Of the 1 crore children in the age group of 14-18 years who currently pursue secondary education, 16 lakh are doing it through open schooling system In a step aimed at enhancing the acceptability of open schooling system, the government is considering FRAming a policy which will enable regular schools adapt distance education programme. “A national policy will be evolved under which regular schools will embrace distance education. This will make distance...