-The Hindu Policymakers must continue to follow the twofold strategy of letting the economy grow fast and attacking poverty directly through poverty alleviation programmes In June 2012, the government of India appointed a committee to take a new look at the methodology for measuring poverty. The committee submitted its report towards the end of June 2014. The purpose of this article is to briefly explain the approach taken by this committee. Growth is...

-The Hindu Driven substantially by the higher education sector, real estate deals and mining income, India's black economy could now be nearly three-quarters the size of its reported Gross Domestic Product (GDP). These are among the findings of a confidential report commissioned by the government and accessed exclusively by The Hindu. Since there were no "reliable" estimates of black money generated in India and held within and outside the country, the UPA...

-Economic and Political Weekly   The emphasis on use of digital technologies to bridge the "rural-urban gap" in the union budget is limited to high talk and minimal allocations. The need for a more comprehensive and peoples' participation-oriented rural action plan should have been the focus while setting sectoral allocations, but that is not to be in this mid-year budget. Vipul Mudgal (vipulmudgal@gmail.com) heads the Inclusive Media for Change project at the Centre...

-The Tribune The UPA's flagship programme MGNREGS changed the employment scene for the rural poor. While 100-day job guarantee was a novel step, loopholes and poor implementation rendered it a liability. The Modi govt hopes to gradually reinvent the scheme, if not entirely scrap it. Midway through the Congress-led UPA's second tenure - believed to be largely the courtesy of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) -...

-The Hindu   An improvement in sanitation and cleanliness will eliminate much of the difference in malnutrition between India and the rest of the world, and across Indian States Historically the greatest advances in longevity and mortality reduction have come not from treatment of individual disease but from public health. This includes modern drainage and sewerage systems (sewage treatment plants), drinking water systems that produce and deliver disease-free water and solid waste disposal...