One would expect a debate such as the current one on poverty estimates to be conducted with a serious exploration of its various facets. However, instead of a comprehensive, fact-driven exploration, the debate has yielded aspersions on the intellectual honesty of academicians. Although given its electoral connotations, one does expect political biases to creep into the debate, the barrage of criticism hurled at the Planning Commission, over its affidavit in...

-The Times of India The building of school infrastructure as per norms set by the Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, is moving at a rather slow pace in the neighbouring Satara district. This, despite the substantial financial allocations made through the central government's Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan (SSA) programme. An independent assessment of 146 schools across Satara district, carried out by the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research (CPR), has...

Experts agree that the economic and environmental costs of interlinking India's rivers far outweigh its projected benefits. Some people believe it is the one-stop solution to prevent floods and droughts, reduce water scarcity, raise irrigation potential and increase foodgrain production in the country. But others say it is just another grandiose scheme involving huge costs and leading to long-term ecological consequences. The contentious idea of interlinking India's rivers has come...

-IANS The percentage of people living in extreme poverty declined from 52% in 1981 to 22% in 2008 thanks to strong economic growth in the emerging markets of India, Brazil and China, according to a new report. This means that the Millennium Development Goal of cutting extreme poverty in half by 2015 has already been met, US think tank Hudson Institute's Centre for Global Prosperity's (CGP) annual Index of Global Philanthropy and...

It is worrying that the Tendulkar method, chosen by the Planning Commission to calculate the poverty line in its latest figures, underestimates the levels of poverty while overestimating poverty reduction. The figures show that 29.8% or 360 million Indians were poor in 2009-10 as compared to 37.2% or 400 million in 2004-05. A poor person has been defined as one who spends R28 per day in urban areas and R22.5...