Marie Antoinette, the liberal and concerned queen of France, on seeing the poor and hungry masses demanding bread, said in a fit of charity — “let them eat cake”. Member of the prestigious National Advisory Council (NAC) Jean Dreze surveyed the performance of the existing National Food For Work Programme (NFFWP) in July 2005 and concluded that the performance was “alarming”. The work guidelines were not being enforced, and the...
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Decline and fall of Indian poverty by Surjit S Bhalla
In this winter of gloom, doom and corruption, the government can bask in some warmth from data collected by its statistical agencies. (Alas, these agencies have yet to hire some basic data-processing capabilities from minor computer firms, let alone agencies like Infosys. Perhaps Nandan Nilekani can loan some programmers from the UID project.) So what is the issue, and what is the evidence?It was only a few months ago that...
More »Target Practice by Sunil Jain
Now that it’s Millennium Development Goal (MDG) week, expect a host of studies/ articles/ commentaries around how India has failed to meet the important MDGs, on how parts of India are worse than sub-Saharan Africa or Bangladesh when it comes to nutrition, and so on. The UN set the ball rolling when it said that “with just five years to the 2015 deadline for achieving the MDGs, the country as a...
More »Making profit out of 'poverty' by SA Aiyar
Caste proponents say the census must include questions on caste to establish true caste ratios. Opponents say questions on caste are socially divisive. They also raise a behavioural objection: the very announcement of a caste census could encourage people to claim, fraudulently, that they belong to a caste entitled to reservations. This behavioural objection applies as forcefully to surveys for determining poverty. The National Sample Survey Organization conducts periodic surveys on...
More »Does NREGA really work? by Surjit Bhalla
Despite tall claims, the NREGA programme is just a dud as most other “in the name of the poor” expenditures - and as much of a dud as predicted by Rajiv Gandhi A decade or so ago, Booker prize winner Arundhati Roy claimed that the building of dams in India had displaced more than 50 million people. This implied that one out of every three rural Indians had had to move...
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