The current perception that cash transfers can replace public provision of basic goods and services and become a catch-all solution for poverty reduction is false. Where cash transfers have helped to reduce poverty, they have added to public provision, not replaced it. For crucial items like food, direct provision protects poor consumers from rising prices and is part of a broader strategy to ensure domestic supply. Problems like targeting errors...
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Starvation line? Govt firm on poverty limit by Basant Kumar Mohanty
Renu Devi is scared. The Planning Commission’s new definition of poverty will eject her from the set of below-poverty-line households, and her family will lose the right to 25kg rice and wheat a month at Rs 5 per kilo. The plan panel has fixed a cut-off of Rs 675 and Rs 870 as the monthly per head expenditure, in rural and urban areas respectively, for a family to qualify as poor....
More »Poverty begets poverty by Richard Mahapatra
A 30-year survey of the poor gives a wake-up call POVERTY is becoming hereditary in India, at least for a sizeable population. That is the conclusion derived from a three-decade tracking of poor households in rural India. A survey by the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC), an international association of researchers and academicians, claims that those who are chronically poor may pass on poverty to their next generation. What’s more, people residing...
More »The surge in wages
-The Business Standard Only anecdotal evidence has been available so far to back the assertion that there has been a sharp rise in agricultural wages. Now, field data bear out the trend. Collected by the Shimla-based Labour Bureau, these numbers show a roughly 50 per cent cumulative rise in rural labour wages in the past two years. The increase in Andhra Pradesh has been assessed at over 40 per cent...
More »NGOs oppose direct cash transfer to poor families
Various civil society groups and NGOs Thursday came together to oppose the Delhi government’s plan to give cash instead of ration to the city’s poor through the Public Distribution System (PDS). The activists said the government had taken the decision in haste. ‘We had gone to meet (Chief Minister) Sheila Dikshit yesterday, but she did not listen to us at all. Instead, she screamed at us and threatened to put us in...
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