-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Manmohan Singh-led UPA government can finally grab an official statistic to burnish its aam aadmi credentials. The percentage of people living below the poverty line has fallen to 21.9 per cent of the population in 2011-12 from 37.2 per cent in 2004-05 - the year that the Congress-led UPA stormed to power. The percentage of people below the poverty line has been estimated at 25.7 per cent in...

-The Business Standard 7 things you should know in the Bhagwati vs Sen slugfest Jagdish Bhagwati and Amartya Sen are the two Indian economists who are most respected for their work. Both have worked on a broad spectrum of issues, though Sen is best known for his work on public choice and development and Bhagwati for his work on trade. They are both liberal, neoclassical economists, who support deregulation and disapprove of...

-The Business Standard Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, who has just written An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions with Jean Dreze, tells Mihir S Sharma that he doesn't understand why his book has received an angry reaction, or why he is being called anti-growth and pro-redistribution. * Is it startling to discover that you are being called a licence Raj socialist? It is very strange indeed. Perhaps some of this reaction is...

-The Business Standard The tragedy involving the death of children in a Bihar school should reinforce recent efforts to improve the programme, notes Amarjeet Sinha. The sad loss of 23 innocent lives after consuming hot cooked meals in a school in Bihar has rightly shocked and angered people. The highly poisonous pesticide monocrotophos found in children's food and a headmistress overlooking the cook and the children's protests about the oil and not...

-Economic and Political Weekly The Chhapra tragedy must ask us how we can improve public services, not scrap them altogether. In the aftermath of the ghastly tragedy in Chhapra, Bihar, where 22 children lost their lives after they consumed a government-provided school meal containing organophosphate pesticides, we must demand of the State a far greater commitment to administering large-scale welfare programmes that are meant to improve, not destroy the life of citizens....