What are the poor most concerned about? After meeting families in 175 Indian villages in the last decade, Anirudh Krishna, says the poor's greatest worry is their children's future. With a manner of a school teacher, Professor Krishna, who teaches at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University in the US, has led a team meeting poor families to find out why poverty persists. The research also includes...

One of the most intriguing features of India's agrarian economy in recent years is the persistence of agrarian distress in many regions, even while agricultural credit flow has risen sharply. Rising flow of credit to agriculture is normally associated with buoyancy in the farm sector. A closer look at the data on agricultural credit reveals that what is termed agricultural credit may have very little to do with agriculture, the...

During my fieldwork in Tonk district of Rajasthan, a Dalit family once narrated a ‘miracle’ to me. In 2002, they faced a drought as bad as the chhappani akaal of 1900-02. But at the end of 2002, the Dalit family was pleasantly surprised: they still had some foodgrain left. This, the family members said, was a result of the good relief work done by the Ashok Gehlot government. Similar proactive State...

Amipur may be a small dot along the national highway from Patna to Nawada, but its ambitions are big. In the 50-odd households in the village, sparsely populated and rife with an uneasy quiet, most men have left for work outside Bihar. Siyaram Chauhan is the one who returned. He was rescued last month by the state government officials from a brick kiln in Uttar Pradesh’s Bahraich where he worked as...

The National Advisory Council's proposals on the Food Security Bill represent a bad deal for the poor. The struggle for an effective and equitable Food Security Bill (FSB) has received a setback with the disappointing proposals put forward by the National Advisory Council. There is a disturbing disjuncture between what is being claimed and the actual implications of the proposals. Indeed it may be said that the NAC proposals create new...