The world has achieved its first Millennium Development Goal of cutting extreme poverty in half ahead of the 2015 deadline, a study by the World Bank shows. The bank defines extreme poverty as living on under $1.25 per day, adjusted for purchasing power parity. According to the report, released this week, 1.29 billion people, or 22 percent of the developing world’s population, live below $1.25 a day, down from 52 percent...
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Global poverty on the decline: World Bank by Mony K Mathew
The rate of poverty, based on the number of people living on less than $1.5 a day, declined across the developing world between 2005 and 2008, according to a World Bank report. Around 1.29 billion people lived below the defined poverty line in 2008, which was equivalent to 22 per cent of the population of the developing world. By contrast, 1.94 billion belonged to this extreme poverty category in 1981. The...
More »Here’s evidence that NREGA is actually destroying jobs by R Jagannathan
Is the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGA) a poverty buster? Or is it a job destroyer? The answer seems to be both, though the scheme of late, has been bedevilled by corruption and many states have lost their enthusiasm for it, forcing the rural development ministry to revamp the scheme last week (read here about the changes). While the scheme has been attacked for many reasons – bloating rural...
More »Gujarat: Marriage of young girls to usher change in prostitute village
-PTI The mass-marriage of many young girls on March 11 is likely to usher in a social revolution in the lives of women of Sarania community in Vadia village of Banaskantha district, where prostitution is a "tradition" and a means to earn bread for their families. Vadia is a small village in Tharad block of Banaskantha, about 210 km from here, comprising of people from Sarania community, a de-notified tribe (DNT). For...
More »A very poor programme by Surjit S Bhalla
MGNREGA 2.0 should really be MGNREGA 0.0 — it has been outdated from the start, five years ago It is a fact universally acknowledged that India is at a fiscal crossroads. It swerved quite significantly to populism over the last several years, and the consequences of this lurch are that the UPA’s own finance minister is (thankfully) losing sleep over the fiscal burden. More specifically, over the subsidy burden. As we all...
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