Consumption-based measures don’t accurately estimate poverty Since the publication of poverty estimates purportedly based on the Tendulkar methodology and the 2009-10 consumption survey of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), many in Parliament and outside, from different political parties, have questioned its conclusions. Concomitantly, media reactions have speculated on poverty’s relationship with fertility, growth, specific schemes, et al. But, India’s poverty, like itself, refuses to classify itself in simple boxes. Beyond the...

-The Telegraph The economic survey has challenged an international assessment that has ranked India 125, or near-bottom, among 132 countries on environmental performance, but has acknowledged that air pollution has increased to alarming levels. The survey, released by the Union government today, has questioned the methodology of the Environmental Performance Index 2012 that has assigned air quality in India a rank of 132, the worst in the world, and similarly low ranks...

Malaria deaths in India could be more than 40 times higher that what is presently estimated. New research published in the Lancet shows that malaria kills 1.2 million people worldwide each year - twice as high as the figure in the World Malaria Report, 2011. In India, the study estimates that "4800 malaria deaths in children younger than 5 years and 42000 malaria deaths in those aged 5 years or older," for...

The government is not keen to change the classification of victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy in its curative petition before the Supreme Court and allow higher compensation for thousands or admit to a higher number of fatalities, although it is ready to consider doubling the relief demanded for the small number it currently accepts as dead and those permanently scarred due to the lethal gas leak. The government seems to...

Without equality, democracy and social justice, which are three interrelated factors, secularism cannot exist as a positive value in society. I HAVE known Prof. Romila Thapar for about 45 years, most of it as a colleague at the Centre for Historical Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Romila, as she is called by almost everybody – from her eight-year-old grandnephew to all of us present here – had helped to...