India’s poor can take heart — for there’s justice even in this world, despite and in spite of the Planning Commission. Planning Commission deputy chairman, and expert on poverty, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, has gotten off his high horse. Ahluwalia said on Monday that a new committee would be set up to come up with a fresh method to identify India’s poor. Last week the Commission had filed an affidavit in the...
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The Poverty Line – yours, mine and ours by Patralekha Chatterjee
Discussing the ‘poverty line’ has become a bit like talking about sex or death. Everybody has a view on it. And no two persons have the same view. The planning commission, members of the national advisory council, the rural development minister, assorted chief ministers, social scientists, economists, the media, the bloggerati — all have made their points loud and clear. However, such is the topic that it continues to trigger verbal...
More »Poverty politics by Swarn Kumar Anand
The Planning Commission’s poverty line affidavit has exposed how blissfully ignorant the glorified economists of the UPA are of the true reality of India The 2G spectrum scam, Commonwealth Games loot, cash-for-vote bribery, Lokpal fiasco, Pranab-Chidambaram duel on the Finance Ministry note, and the count goes on. It seems the UPA-II is stuck in a rut. As if the battering by the united Opposition and hauling over the coals by civil...
More »For social justice by PS Krishnan
Any new system for the socio-economic progress of Dalits and other vulnerable sections must not lose sight of Special Component Plan goals. THE Planning Commission's “Approach to the 12th Five Year Plan” deals with the Scheduled Castes (S.C.s) briefly in a portion of Chapter 11 titled “Social and Regional Equity”. It, however, significantly mentions the need to devise a new system that can overcome the difficulties experienced with regard to the...
More »‘Explain poverty line issue'
-The Hindu ‘Panel's affidavit skirted main issues of why should there be poverty line that determines BPL “caps” and to re-consider poverty line' The Right to Food Campaign on Thursday asked the Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia to explain how the per capita poverty line expenditure of Rs. 25 per day in rural and Rs. 32 per day in urban area could be normatively ‘adequate' as the panel had claimed...
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