-The Indian Express Socio-Economic and Caste Census can help identify welfare beneficiaries without falling into a binary trap. The release earlier this month of the Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) has been followed by much media analysis. Some have expressed scepticism about what it shows and others have treated it as yet another set of numbers on how many are poor in India. It has also been variously hailed as revolutionising benefit...

-Frontline Odisha shows the way in the implementation of the ICDS scheme to ensure that children receive nutrition and care in their earliest years, but the Centre’s moves to slash budgetary allocations could wreak havoc on such programmes. At the Tasarda anganwadi centre in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district, as the auxiliary nurse and midwife (ANM) pulled out the blood pressure (BP) instrument to check a pregnant woman, the children at the anganwadi began...

-Economic and Political Weekly This is not "big data" to be used to cut down welfare expenditure. It was the Ministry of Rural Development which, for close to five years beginning in 2010, designed, planned and oversaw the execution of the 2011 Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC), whose first batch of results were released earlier this month. Yet, it was somewhat unusual to see Union Minister for Finance, Arun Jaitley, rather...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Centre today urged the Supreme Court to vacate its two-year-old stay on making Aadhaar cards mandatory for welfare benefits, praising the "tremendous success" of a programme Narendra Modi had trashed as a "scam" while in Opposition. Moving an application in the apex court, the government pleaded that the court stay was hobbling various social-sector programmes, including the direct benefit Transfer schemes. It said that while beneficiaries' money was...

-Down to Earth Poverty is urbanising at a rapid pace, it says Despite the growing number of social safety net schemes to improve lives of the poor, it is still a distant dream for the almost half of the world’s poor to come under it. According to a recent World Bank report, nearly 55 per cent of the total world’s poor population is still out of its coverage. The poverty is rising...