One man’s fiscal problem is another man’s lifeline. Trigger happy bureaucrats and economists may love shooting down subsidies because it bloats the fiscal deficit and burdens the government but the simple fact is that in a one billion strong nation, in which nearly one in every three live below the poverty line, one needs an effective and efficient method through which privileged tax payers can support the poor. Last week, finance...

-PTI Describing the fresh poverty estimates of the Planning Commission as a "dishonest" attempt to conceal reality, CPI(M) today asked Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to shun these figures and urged him not to use these "fraudulent" estimates to deny poor people of their right to BPL cards. In a statement, the party said even the recently released Household Amenities and Assets Census of 2011 shows the extent of poverty in different spheres...

India doubled the pace at which it has been reducing poverty in rural areas in the five years to 2009-10 by moving around 47 million over the so-called poverty line. Interestingly, the five years to 2009-10 also saw India grow the fastest in any five-year period in the past, at an average of 8.7%. In the same period, 5 million people in urban India moved above the poverty line. The numbers...

-The Times of India With Tamil Nadu CM J Jayalalithaa giving the nod for the Kudankulam nuclear power plants, Russia said that it was going to send its scientists to the site on Tuesday to start commissioning work for the first unit of the reactors. Russian officials in India said that Moscow stood vindicated by Jayalalithaa's decision to back the reactors that couldn't be commissioned last year because of sudden protests...

National AIDS Control Programme urged to move beyond medicine-centric approach The government programmes for children suffering from HIV/AIDS should move from medicine-centric approach to include nutrition and preventive care, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) has recommended. In its recently released report ‘Rights and entitlements of children affected and infected by HIV/AIDS 2010-11’, the organisation also advocated provisions for issuing BPL cards to children who have lost their...