Late last month we received the exciting news that India now has a population of 1.21 billion. This figure generated less discussion than I expected. Maybe it would have been more mind-boggling a few months ago, before all the scams and scandals inured us to the large number of zeros that a billion signifies. Or maybe we were distracted by the other bad news in the census results — the...

700 million Indians have cell phones, but 638 million still don’t have access to proper sanitation. At this year’s South Asian Conference on Sanitation, social solutions to the problem were discussed, including “naming and shaming” and the CLTS programme which gets villagers to map the open areas where they defecate There can hardly be a bigger taboo than sanitation when it comes to the government, bureaucracy or even the people...

Reconsidering its earlier decision, the United Progressive Alliance government is now contemplating not to give direct inclusion to all members of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities in the proposed BPL list if one goes by the modalities being laid out for conducting the census. Their inclusion will now be based on their ranking obtained from the number of deprivation Indicators they satisfy. Similarly, minorities too don't get the same...

Tribal dominated districts have turned the theory of bias for male offspring on its head, while literacy levels have registered a surprisingly high growth, perhaps signalling a marginal improvement in the overall social structure of a largely underdeveloped state held hostage to political instability and Left wing extremism. According to provisional data of Census 2011 for Jharkhand, released by director of census operations Sunil Kumar Burnwal today, tribal dominated districts like...

Distribution of basic food grains and fuel at controlled prices every month through the Public Distribution System (PDS) could be the largest service provided by the Indian State, touching as it does over 65 million families through a network of nearly half a million retail shops. Given that the urban middle class has little stake in the health of the PDS, there have to be some compelling reasons for the...