The government will compile figures at the district and block levels to arrive at a more accurate identification of poor for better targeting of welfare schemes. So far, the poor in India have only been counted at the national and state levels. The Planning Commission has commissioned a study which will come up with these relevant numbers soon. The poverty cut-offs (a minimum monthly expenditure below which people are considered...

The RTI juggernaut has begun to roll over Indian babudom. Let us not turn the clock back. Over the past week, there have been reports that the Prime Minister's Office, responding to Sonia Gandhi's muscular intervention, is backing off on the dreaded amendments to the Right to Information Act, 2005. On the other hand, it is worth remembering that the amendments scare has never been too far away. It resurfaced as recently...

A decade-old scheme to organize the rural poor into self-help groups and impart training to them has brought hundreds of thousands above the poverty line, says the rural development ministry, which executes the programme. Some 4.5 million people living below the poverty line have been trained under the Swarnjayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana, or SGSY, while 3.5 million self-help groups (SHGs) have been created since its launch in 1999. An evaluation of SGSY...

To perpetuate a system that assigns a household to a single BPL/APL category in circumstances in which poverty is multi-dimensional is not only bad economics, but unconscionable as well.  The pilot surveys for the next Census of BPL (below-poverty-line) households are due to begin. Discussions are now on to finalise the methodology for the survey, and as the BPL Census is a matter of the subsistence and survival of hundreds...

The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) will move a step closer to the realisation of its poll promise to promulgate a food security law if the Planning Commission, as is expected, conditionally approves the findings of the poverty panel report estimating the number of poor in the country at its meeting on Saturday. In preparation, Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia met senior government officials and some members of the...