-The Indian Express While decadal growth rates are declining among all religious communities, the decline has been sharper among Muslims than among Hindus over the last three decades. The Census 2011 data on Population by Religious Communities, released by the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, confirms the declining trend in population growth rate in the country. While decadal growth rates are declining among all religious communities, the decline has been...

-HuffingtonPost.in In the foothills of the Himalayas, on the outskirts of Dehradun in a town called Rajpur, sits a bustling network of co-operatives strung together by a family of American social entrepreneurs. If one is fortunate enough to venture to this specific community in India, one would never guess that hundreds of jobs are being supported in different pockets by the Murray's desire to create opportunity for artisans with challenging lives....

-PTI Claiming flaws in the process of identifying beneficiaries of welfare schemes based on the Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) data, a group of parliamentarians, intellectuals and socials activists today appealed to the Centre to take corrective measures to provide benefits to the deserving lot. In a memorandum submitted to Union Rural Development Minister Birender Singh, the members picked flaws in the process of identifying welfare schemes beneficiaries. "The clearly stated aim...

-Livemint.com The problem with the SECC is the absence of cross-tabulations showing the intersections between the seven deprivation sets The original intent of the Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC), whose findings for rural India were made public in June, was to collect information on economic and caste identifiers for access to subsidized food under the National Food Security Act of 2013, and to define a priority set with higher access and...

-Outlook The poor are increasingly displaying food preferences for better tasting, flavoured and packaged foods but with low nutritional content. Renewed media hype about counting the number of poor was sparked by the recent release of the Socio-Economic Caste Census. While many analysts found the prevalence of poverty alarmingly high, others debunked the SECC report for its muddled and incoherent view of deprivation. An important contribution of this report, however, is the...