The 1,600 families in Haryana’s Panchkula district which line up at fair price shops for foodgrains and kerosene can do away with their prized ration cards, pieces of paper that entitle the poor to subsidized food and fuel. Beginning Tuesday, while they still have to queue up, these families will receive their rations after a biometric identification using smart cards. That’s a small beginning for an ambitious Rs138 crore Centrally funded project...

A significant proportion of the country’s official below poverty line (BPL) population cannot be termed ‘poor’. Fathom this: around a fourth of the 14 million odd BPL households in urban India own a two-wheeler, a third of them a colour TV and almost two-third a pressure cooker. Almost one in five urban BPL households has at least one well-educated, graduate or above, member. The 56 million-strong rural BPL population too exhibits...

Nearly one third of Muslims in the nation survive on less than Rs 550 a month, economic think tank NCAER said, amid the ongoing debate on reservations in jobs and educational institutions for those belonging to the community. A survey by the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER) said that three out of every 10 Muslims were below poverty line and lived on less than Rs 550 a month...

Monica Das Gupta is a senior social scientist at the World Bank. Her field research in Punjab, when she was at the National Council of Applied Economic Research, established that sex differentials in child mortality in rural Punjab persisted despite relative wealth, socio-economic development including rapid universalization of female education, fertility decline, and mortality decline. Amartya Sen’s writings drew attention to female foeticide and infanticide in Asia that led to...

The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government loves committees. Have problem, will deliberate, seems to be the government’s motto. So, it is not surprising that the chief ministers’ conference on price rise ended with yet another committee being appointed, this time on the overhaul of the public distribution system (PDS). This despite the fact that the recent surge in prices had nothing to do with the absence of a universal PDS...