-Livemint.com India’s lack of official data for estimates could impair policy formulation and thus hurt the economy Two different sets of poverty estimates for India were released recently. One of the papers was authored by Surjit Bhalla, Karan Bhasin, and Arvind Virmani and the second by Sutirtha Roy and Roy Weide, both affiliated to the World Bank. Both presented estimates for roughly the same period, after 2011-12, but ended up at starkly...

-TheWire.in A recent research paper examining consumption expenditure and landholdings in Uttar Pradesh sheds new light. Mumbai: For years, researchers and academics have studied how wealth and income inequality in India is, more often than not, split along caste lines, with upper castes cornering a larger piece of the pie. However, the measure of their enrichment and the consequent impoverishment and exclusion of Muslim Dalits and Hindu Dalits has received less attention. A...

-Newsclick.in The high healthcare costs were expected to be addressed through the introduction of health insurance by the Union government, but it covers less than 30% of hospital charges leaving a heavy financial burden on the poor. Health outcomes have remained grossly unequal, with India's dalits and adivasis living shorter lives of poorer quality, as per a recent paper published by Oxfam India. Private infrastructure now accounts for nearly 62% of India's...

-Financial Express Dataset and methodological weaknesses cast doubt on recent poverty estimates that claim drastic reduction Bhalla, Bhasin and Virmani in a working paper (IMF), claimed India’s poverty, per a $1.9 per person per day poverty line (at PPP), was 0.9% of the population in 2020. Thanks to government transfer of free rations of 5 kg per person month, it fell to 0.8% (from 0.9% in 2019). Roy and de Velt, for...

-Hindustan Times Hearing the RTI application of Bhupendra Kumar Pandey, the commission ordered the ‘symbolic punishment’ on Monday. Lucknow: The Uttar Pradesh State Information Commission has asked a public information officer (PIO) to feed mid-day meal to 250 school students in Ghazipur as a “symbolic punishment” for delay in replying to an RTI application. Hearing the RTI application of Bhupendra Kumar Pandey, the commission ordered the ‘symbolic punishment’ on Monday. Information commissioner Ajay Kumar...