What is rural and what is urban is largely an artefact of definition and relative. See the table below. Most of India's 'rural' population resides in villages that contain between 500 and 5,000 inhabitants. Some argue that in other countries, many of these villages would be classified as urban. These studies point out that if India were to be a little more liberal in its definition of urban areas (minimum...

Exercise begins in June, but beneficiaries of govt schemes will still be those identified as poor by Plan panel India has embarked on an exerciseto identify the poor that will in reality end up choosing who will be eligible for benefits and who won’t, an outcome that could be controversial. The Union cabinet on Thursday approved the launch in June of a census to identify those living below the poverty line (BPL),...

The arrest of Suresh Kalmadi on 25 April marked yet another scene in the prolonged drama surrounding the Commonwealth Games held in Delhi in October 2010. Yet the general media focus on Kalmadi may have served to distract attention from the many other acts of omission and commission that mark the sordid history of that extravagantly planned and deeply flawed public show. In these other actions, there are stories of funds...

Even at this rate India might fail to meet the millennium development goal on sanitation In April last year when a UN report said more Indians had mobile phones than toilets, it pointed to a major miss in the millennium development goal on access to sanitation in the country. The message was clear at the South Asian Conference on Sanitation (SACOSAN), the highest inter-governmental forum to discuss sanitation in the subcontinent,...

Government undecided on criteria to identify families below poverty line A survey by the Indian government in 2002 to determine households below poverty line (BPL) left out many poor families. Nearly a decade later, the Union Ministry of Rural Development (MORD) is trying to set the wrong right. But it is unable to decide on the criteria for identifying poor households. As a consequence, the BPL survey that was to...