-Economic and Political Weekly The government has notified a Draft Land Reforms Policy which, on paper, has all the requisites of an earnest programme. Yet, the near total failure of earlier efforts at land reforms in India leave little room for hope that something substantial will at last be done to combat landlessness. Harsh Mander (manderharsh@gmail.com) is with the Centre for Equity Studies, New Delhi, and works with survivors of mass violence,...

-The Indian Express What caused the steep fall in poverty reported by the Planning Commission? The evidence is mixed Earlier this week, the Planning Commission released estimates of the incidence of poverty in 2011-12. As in virtually the entire literature on the measurement of poverty in India, these estimates are based on data on per capita consumption expenditure collected by the National Sample Survey Organisation. The estimates show that there has been...

-The Hindu     In spite of the rosy picture painted by the World Bank, the prospect of eliminating extreme poverty remains distant In a protracted period of gloom and persistent recession with feeble signs of recovery in a large part of the developed world, the World Bank, Brookings Institution and others can be forgiven for their euphoria over the accomplishment of a key Millennium Development Goal (MDG) - of halving extreme poverty in...

-The Hindu Developing and emerging economies may not exactly be dazzling in the current overall grim global economic climate of joblessness and sluggish growth. But the region has registered rising employment and narrowing income inequalities, relative to their rich counterparts, since the 2007-08 meltdown, says the International Labour Organisation's World of Work Report 2013. The backbone of this promising story are the middle income groups in these countries, which have...

-The Hindu Every hour 25 women fall victim to crimes; 11 suffer cruelty by husbands and other relatives; three are raped; and there is one dowry death. Horrific crimes against women have, in fact, continued unabated. What is worse is that there has been an acceleration of such crimes in recent years, with the annual rate rising from 5.9 per cent in 2006 to 7.8 per cent during 2006-2011. Cases of domestic...