-The Financial Express World Bank's latest data suggests realisation of millenium development goals may not be far off. Reduction of poverty and hence, how it is measured, has long been a contentious political economy issue in India. There is general discomfort every time the headcount ratio of the number of poor, based upon an accepted methodology recommended by an expert committee, declines; this then triggers a process to revisit known issues by...

-The Asian Age In India and around the world, poverty is predominantly rural. Development agencies often note that 75 per cent of the world's extremely poor people - those who earn less than $1.25 a day - live in rural areas. New figures from the 2014 Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), which measures overlapping dimensions of deprivation, show that rural poverty rates are even higher in some regions. In South Asia, the...

-Economic and Political Weekly   The emphasis on use of digital technologies to bridge the "rural-urban gap" in the union budget is limited to high talk and minimal allocations. The need for a more comprehensive and peoples' participation-oriented rural action plan should have been the focus while setting sectoral allocations, but that is not to be in this mid-year budget. Vipul Mudgal (vipulmudgal@gmail.com) heads the Inclusive Media for Change project at the Centre...

-The Times of India RANCHI: Developmental economist Jean Dreze, who has co-authored with Nobel laureate Amartya Sen on the issue of famine, led a movement against hunger in Maoist-affected Manika block of Latehar district on Friday. Dreze, who has been working extensively in the state for the past several years, taking up issues like MGNREGA and food security, urged the villagers to call for the effective implementation of the Food Security...

-The Hindu   An improvement in sanitation and cleanliness will eliminate much of the difference in malnutrition between India and the rest of the world, and across Indian States Historically the greatest advances in longevity and mortality reduction have come not from treatment of individual disease but from public health. This includes modern drainage and sewerage systems (sewage treatment plants), drinking water systems that produce and deliver disease-free water and solid waste disposal...