-The Indian Express   Rural areas have shown a faster pace of decline as poverty levels dipped by over seven percentage points in the past five years in the country. As per Planning Commission estimates released on Monday, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Uttarakhand are among the top performers, with the decline in poverty in each of these states estimated at 10 percentage points or more between 2004-05...

-The Telegraph The controversial poverty data from the Planning Commission has a message for Mamata Banerjee: the Marxists have brought down the number of destitute in Bengal but much more needs to be done. Latest data suggest that the number of poor has dipped by 7.5 percentage points in Bengal between 2004-05 and 2009-10, which covers the last five years of Left rule in the state. Poverty in urban areas in Bengal came...

India's decision this month to produce Germany-based multinational Bayer's anti-cancer drug Nexavar, in the first use of "compulsory licensing" in South Asia, will save lives but also raises intricate questions. Under the compulsory licensing process, a government can under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules bypass a patent owner's rights after three years and order the manufacture and sale of life-saving medicines at much cheaper cost than by obtaining the medicine from...

There are two messages, one good, the other, bad, in the latest poverty numbers released by the government. The good news first. It is obvious that poverty has declined in aggregate terms, both in rural and urban India. At a national level, it has declined by 7.4 percentage points from 37.2% in 2004-05 to 29.8% in 2009-10; rural poverty, over the same period, has declined from 41.8% to 33.8%, and urban...

-IANS   States should be allowed to declare an off period for the rural jobs scheme MGNREGA during peak agricultural season, says Sumitra Mahajan, chief of a parliamentary panel on rural development. She also believes extending the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) to urban areas - as suggested by the Economic Survey last week - is not practicable unless the scheme is made to include semi-skilled work apart from manual...