-The Hindu Alleviating poverty in India requires not only cash transfers but also other enabling changes Advocates of unconditional cash transfers claim that they can be both emancipatory and transformative. They argue that people are quite capable of making rational decisions. And that this kind of basic income support can improve their lives. I have no quarrel with the claim that we must trust the poor. Such suspicion is part of an elite...

The tribal or the Scheduled Tribe communities constitute only 8.6 percent of India's population and yet, they are around 40 percent of those displaced due to ‘development’ projects. In the midst of a raging debate on the new Land Acquisition Ordinance, a new report brings out many such paradoxes of development versus displacement of India’s indigenous or Adivasi people. The report exposes the anomalies of land alienation, displacement and forced...

-Business Standard The wide disparity between the best healthcare & quackery that much of the population must endure is partly to blame for India's apathy Whether Indians in ancient times discovered algebra and the Pythagoras theorem before "selflessly" passing them on to the Arabs and the Greeks as Science and Technology Minister Harsh Vardhan said last week is for agile historians to ponder. Widely accepted is that Indians in ancient times studied...

-The Guardian Universal healthcare is often presented as an idealistic goal that remains out of reach for all but the richest nations. That's not the case, writes Amartya Sen. Look at what has been achieved in Rwanda, Thailand and Bangladesh Twenty-five hundred years ago, the young Gautama Buddha left his princely home, in the foothills of the Himalayas, in a state of agitation and agony. What was he so distressed about?...

-The Hindu Business Line Unlike in the 1970s, the moral outrage over glaring differences has given way to an aspirational ethos For those who have lived in Indian cities long enough, it is difficult to miss the remarkable change in people's tolerance of economic inequality. Back in the 1970s, economic inequality was a major part of the urban discourse. The various dimensions of inequality dominated coffee house discussions, theatre and even popular cinema, contributing...