-The Hindu Low output and land fragmentation are critical issues, says survey Tamil Nadu: The writing on the wall for Tamil Nadu in agriculture is pretty clear, though the State's grain production during 2013-14 was good. The latest Economic Appraisal of the government has shown that Tamil Nadu needs out-of-the-box policies to tackle agriculture production and its impact on food inflation. The State did well in 2013-14 to bounce back from a nightmare drought...

-The Business Standard World Bank-IMF study, however, says pace of reduction in absolute poverty has been substantial; report stresses skills training for youth India was home to about a third of the world's poor in 2011, according to a progress report on various social indicators from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), issued on Wednesday. In other words, the highest number of the poor lived in India in...

-Economic and Political Weekly   The proposed Rangarajan method on measurement of poverty in India borrows elements from three earlier methods - those of Alagh, Lakdawala and Tendulkar. An important departure in the Rangarajan method is to compute the poverty line commodity basket by combining items from two fractile groups to address the relatively higher expenses for some essential non-food items. This, while being statistically plausible, poses a behavioural dilemma, as there...

-The Hindu Providing access to credit likely to be a hard step For Prime Minister Narendra Modi's newly launched Jan Dhan Yojana to be successful, India needs to provide over 100 million households access to banks, data show. An even harder step, however, is likely to be access to credit. As of March 2012, the most recent year for which relevant Reserve Bank of India (RBI) statistics are available, India had over 900...

-Down to Earth Going by current trends, the target for reducing infant mortality and improving other human development indices seem near impossible to achieve Less that 500 days are left for nations to achieve the targets set under the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDGs); there are eight such goals which range from halving extreme poverty rates to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education. The countdown for the deadline...