-Down to Earth Our policy makers should move away from the income criterion for estimating poverty and take cognisance of other indicators Amid mounting criticism and heated debates about the poverty line, a challenge has resurfaced to examine whether there could be a single non-monetary criterion of estimating poverty. A poverty line is a monetary cut-off point below which a person is deemed to be poor. Thus, any attempt to measure poverty...

-The Hindustan Times In his Independence Day address, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the rupee is down because of the global economic crisis. A look at the events of the last decade reveals otherwise. When the global economy was doing well between 2002 and 2008, the rupee was stable at about Rs. 45 to a dollar. When the global crisis erupted in 2008 and continued until 2012, the rupee held stable...

-The Times of India LUCKNOW: Illegal mining in Uttar Pradesh between 2005-11 caused a loss of Rs 1,400 crore to the exchequer, says a draft report of the comptroller & auditor general. The report, prepared on the activities of state geology and mining directorate, belies state government's claims on checking illegal mining and indicates that illegal mining is widespread. It reveals several procedural gaps in legal quarrying as well. The auditors, who...

-Live Mint The absence of genuine competition at mandis and numerous transaction charges are distorting onion prices The joke doing the rounds today is that the spike in onion prices has been a great equalizer, bringing parity between the price of a bottle of beer and a kilo of onion. The humble vegetable has also found pride of place as a gift item to customers at a tyre shop in Jamshedpur,...

-Frontline A World Bank report on climate change warns that a warmer world will trap millions in poverty. "Much of the advance of European capitalists and other members of the European ruling class was at the cost of the colonised and enslaved peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America," says Amiya Kumar Bagchi in his book "Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital." Capitalist expansion following the Industrial Revolution involved...