If a country’s national income is rising, someone in the country must be getting richer. Unless income distribution is changing, all income classes must get richer at about the same pace. If a constant standard of living is defined to classify everyone below it as poor, then as incomes rise, the proportion of the poor so defined must shrink, eventually to zero. If income grows 5 per cent a year...

Women currently make up around half of the world’s migrant population, even without taking into consideration short-term and seasonal movements. Despite the widespread prevalence of female migration, there are still some common stereotypes about its nature: that it is mostly women and girls accompanying their male heads of household, or dominantly by young, unmarried women, mostly for marriage or for some defined work enabled by contractors. Yet the migration of...

The film industry is tackling the controversial issue of farmer suicides After drinking pesticide out of sheer desperation, poverty-stricken farmer Nandu collapsed. He did this on screen in front of an audience at a packed multiplex cinema, which issued a collective gasp. Nandu is just a character in a recent Indian film about farmer suicides. But his tragic fate has been a reality for thousands of farmers across India. For the first...

As the 6-year-old son in an upper-class Brahmin family, Bindeshwar Pathak wanted to know what would happen if he touched a scavenger, one of India's "untouchables," stuck at the bottom of the country's social order and fated to collect and dispose of human waste. When he did, his grandmother punished him by forcing him to swallow cow dung and urine, and making him bathe in water from the Ganges. "This...

Monsoon this year has failed most of India, causing drought in even well-irrigated and rainfed areas. Ravleen Kaur reports how our food preferences are making us vulnerable to drought Hari Achal Singh has been a farmer for as long as he can remember. And that’s as long as India has been independent. He recalls his childhood when his family depended on rain for irrigation. “We grew arhar (red gram), bajra...