-The Business Standard   Policy must target faster growth in labour-intensive sectors It was reported on Wednesday that a sample of large manufacturing companies saw their workforce grow at an average rate of almost three per cent every year over the past decade. Putting aside technical niceties such as the representativeness of the sample, to the extent that the companies covered are mostly market leaders in their respective sectors, this statistic is very...

-IPS News   ATTAPPADI, India, May 4 2014 (IPS) - The death of a 10-day-old girl last November in the Attappadi tribal belt of Kerala, one of India's best performing states in terms of human development indices, shows how the country's battle against child mortality is far from won. The infant's mother, Saraswathy, a 20-year-old from the Kurumba tribe, was admitted to a government hospital, and delivered the next day. At 1.8 kg,...

-The Hindu   Challenge is to save existing acreage by increasing productivity, reducing cost Mangalore: Area of paddy cultivated in kharif season in Dakshina Kannada decreased by more than 17 per cent and in rabi by more than 15 per cent in the past decade and a half, according to the Department of Agriculture. Officials attributed this to farmers switching over to horticulture crops and converting the area under the food crop for various...

-The Business Standard   Or, why our subsidy and tax policies have been almost exactly wrong Thomas Piketty's seminal book on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, comes at a fortuitous time. Although inequality has been a well-discussed issue in India for some time now, the success of the book contributes by sharpening the debate. It complements the McKinsey Global Institute's (MGI) report titled "From poverty to empowerment: India's imperative for jobs, growth,...

-Down to Earth   Poverty line figures hide people's aspirations There are lies, damn lies and statistics, American author Mark Twain once wrote echoing a similar statement by the British statesman Benjamin Disraeli. Statistics aim to reveal a lot, but they conceal vital information. This concealing tendency of statistics explains much of the flak received by the Planning Commission when it released figures on the poverty line. In 2012, the commission announced that...