Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar (TOI March 25 and ET March 28) has strongly defended the Planning Commission's stance that there is nothing amiss with the poverty line drawn at Rs 22.40 in rural areas and Rs 28.65 in urban areas (down from initial estimates of Rs 32 and Rs 26, respectively). Let us discount the copious tears being shed by various politicians and their parties on this new line of poverty...

A team of the National Commission for Women (NCW) will arrive in West Bengal next week to conduct an independent probe into the series of alleged rapes being reported from across the State. The three-member panel, headed by NCW member Wansuk Syiem, will includes member-secretary Anita Agnihotri and member Nirmala Sawant Prabhalkar, an NCW official told The Hindu over phone from New Delhi on Friday. The panel had taken suo motu cognisance...

By selectively borrowing habits from the West, the urban Indian has worsened his chances with cancer. Doctors say that while the city-bred Indian has willingly adopted a western diet, lapping up high-fat foods and shunning high-fibre content, he or she hasn't picked up the healthy western attitude of detecting and treating cancer early.  The end-result, as the India's Million Death Study (MDS) reported on Thursday shows, is that urban Indians are...

The purpose of this piece is not to defend the Planning Commission on poverty figures but to indicate that the methodologies have evolved over time after considerable research and they are useful for policy purposes if not for linking with entitlement programmes (some of us have written earlier that the poor and vulnerable are more numerous than the commission's poverty figures and these should be delinked from entitlement programmes).  The commission...

In the first example of his intention to take “difficult decisions” to contain the ballooning subsidy burden to control the fiscal deficit, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Monday denied permission to food minister KV Thomas for about 26.5 million tonnes of additional food grain allocation to states at subsidised rates over the normal allocation that would have cost the exchequer Rs 32,794 crore of food subsidy.   “It will have to be...