The government on Tuesday contested the WHO figures that put the number of Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB) cases in India at 63,000, saying there were only 10,267. As many as 38,287 suspected cases were examined till the end of 2011 and of them, 10,267 have been diagnosed with MDR-TB and 6,994 put on treatment, according to TB India-2012 — the annual status report of the Revised National TB Control Programme...

This month, two women’s stories, told courageously, helped to underline the reality of domestic violence in India. Nita Bhalla, a journalist, wrote for the BBC about being physically assaulted by her partner. Meena Kandasamy, a poet and writer on social issues, wrote movingly in Outlook, a national newsmagazine, of surviving a violent marriage: “My skin has seen enough hurt to tell its own story.” Both Ms. Kandasamy and Ms. Bhalla are,...

Critics are wrong when they say poverty has not declined. However, they are right, unknowingly though, when they say that the Planning Commission has not been entirely forthcoming about how it arrived at the poverty estimates it put out last week. The commission seems to have quietly tweaked the consumption data for 2009-10 used to estimate poverty. Hence, not only has it undercounted the poor in 2009-10 by some 18 million,...

Inequality in India is worsening and clearly following the US pattern India is a “relatively low-income inequality country” – to borrow an expression from a World Bank publication – when compared to China or Brazil, but there is no doubt that disparities have been widening of late. Planning Commission officials have admitted that inequality has risen in the first decade of the new millennium, although the factors responsible for it need...

To get the Below Poverty Line figures in perspective, we need to closely monitor the numbers driving the Corporate Plunder Line. One Tendulkar makes the big scores. The other wrecks the averages. The Planning Commission clearly prefers Suresh to Sachin. Using Professor Tendulkar's methodology, it declares that there's been another massive fall in poverty. Yes, another (“more dramatic in the rural areas”). “Record Fall in Poverty” reads one headline. The record...