The fracas over R32 per day was amusing and sad. Obviously, none of the journalists and politicians had known that the level used to be even lower in previous years. In 2004-05, the level was R552 per person per month for an urban person and R363 for rural. So, that is about R17.5 (R12) per day. The stylised anger only revealed that India’s elite may protest about poverty but they...
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Looking for the Poor
-EPW The media noise shed little light on the important issues involved in deciding the coverage of welfare programmes. The context for the Planning Commission’s (PC) affidavit on the official poverty line was the deliberation in the Supreme Court on how many people could be covered by the public distribution system (PDS). But while the sound and fury over the poverty line – Rs 32 per capita per day in the urban...
More »Dantewada's dilemma by Smita Gupta
The tribal people of Chhattisgarh are in an extremely dangerous situation, caught as they are between the state forces and the Maoists. THIRTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD Soni Sori, an Adivasi schoolteacher from Chhattisgarh, was arrested in Delhi on October 4 on charges of acting as a conduit between the Essar group and the Maoists, the former accused of giving “protection money” to the latter. On October 7, she moved the Delhi High Court to...
More »Mayawati rejects Jairam Ramesh's charge of rural job scam
-The Economic Times Crying foul over politicisation of the rural jobs scheme, Chief Minister Mayawati has written a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, alleging a "preconcieved agenda" of Union Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh. Mayawati in her letter on Friday alleged that the letter Ramesh wrote to her was leaked to the media much before it reached her office. She slammed Ramesh for accusing the state government by making his...
More »Judicial delay may become a thing of the past by NR Madhava Menon
The National Mission to improve the delivery of justice is at work. In October 2009, on the basis of a Vision Document adopted at a judicial conference in New Delhi, the Government of India approved in principle a National Mission to reduce pendency and delays in the judicial system and enhance accountability through structural changes, higher performance standards and capacity-building. Many past attempts to achieve the goals did not yield results...
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