-PTI Amritsar: "In the coming time, we have PLAns to spend Rs 50,000 crore on farming and irrigation sectors in the country." Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Tuesday said the Centre was PLAnning to spend Rs 50,000 crore on the farming and irrigation sector and PLAns were also afoot to roll out an insurance scheme exclusively for the farming sector to compensate for crop loss. Admitting that the condition of farmers is...

-The Hindu By abdicating its responsibility to conduct the caste census and turning it into a poverty-cum-caste survey, the previous dispensation at the Centre made the exercise casual and perfunctory. This has been proved by the way the survey has turned out. In August 2010, Finance Minister and head of the Group of Ministers, Pranab Mukherjee, made a reassuring statement in Parliament on behalf of the government of India, that there would...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Landlessness and dependence on manual casual labour for a livelihood are key deprivations facing rural families, socio-economic census figures suggest. This, experts say, means they are far more vulnerable to impoverishment than indicated by a PLAin reading of the census data. While 48.5 per cent of all rural households are saddled with at least one deprivation indicator, the eye-opener is how much the other factors overlap with...

-The Hindu The ‘development’ discourse serves the same purpose as the colonial apparatus but without the bad press. After 67 years of failing to eliminate deprivation in India, is it time to look for new ideas? The Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) 2011, which hit the headlines earlier this month, tells us that half the households in rural India are landless, dependant on casual manual labour, and live in deprivation. By suggesting...

-The Indian Express Push for cash transfers tacitly asks citizens to fend for themselves The implementation of cash transfers by a state would necessarily entail: one, the identification of beneficiaries on the basis of predefined eligibility parameters; and two, calculating the exact amount of money, equivalent to the monetary value of the subsidy that beneficiaries were supposed to get, and transferring it into their bank accounts — with the intention that they...