-The Telegraph World Bank report suggests that 33% of the Jan Dhan accounts were opened by people who already had bank accounts New Delhi: The Congress on Thursday said the Jan Dhan accounts, one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship programmes, were “an exercise in mass deception”, aimed at creating propaganda tools for “self-praise” rather than the avowed objective of financial inclusion of the poor. “By December 2016, twenty-four per cent of the...

-TheWire.in/ Business Standard Asked what action was taken after receiving Rajan's list of NPA defaulters suspected of fraud, the PMO replied that this information does not fall within the scope of RTI New Delhi: Information disclosed in response to an RTI request made by The Wire has confirmed that former Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan indeed notified Narendra Modi of the need to probe key defaulters as early as eight...

-Frontline.inJean Dreze is a well-known Indian economist working in the field of "development economics". Born in Belgium, he studied mathematical economics at the University of Essex and completed his PhD from the Indian Statistical Institute (New Delhi) in 1982.He has taught at the London School of Economics and the Delhi School of Economics and is currently visiting professor at Ranchi University as well as honorary professor at the Delhi School...

For long, economists have argued among themselves whether income should be the only criterion for measuring poverty. After all, in real life a person can face multiple deprivations, say, in terms of access to education, health and living standards, among others. The multidimensional poverty index (MPI), which offers a valuable complement to traditional income-based poverty measures, was first introduced in the 2010 Human Development Report (HDR). The MPI looks at...

-The Hindu Bhuira's women are coping with the higher workload by creating vastly more flexible family and community structures. And they are simultaneously pushing towards modernity much faster than their neighbours. Everyone in the village sneaks a glance when Upasana Kumari drives her White Maruti 800 to work. “Driving a car is intoxicating,” says Kumari. A winding, muddy, single lane road that starts from the edge of the hillock where Kumari’s house...