-The Wall Street Journal These days, Indian policymakers are debating how to create a vast new food entitlement program. There is talk of poor households struggling to cope with high food prices and malnourishment among their children. What you don’t hear much about, however, is the most tragic and outrageous consequence of India’s failure to feed its people adequately: starvation deaths. India is a nation that prides itself on having been self-sufficient in...

In the mid-eighties there was a rumour which later turned out to be true: US livestock were being fed with foodgrains in order to ensure better quality of their meat. Later it proved to be corn and not fine cereals like wheat and rice. The Indian intelligentsia was appalled and indignant: How come cows and buffaloes were fed with grains while millions of people continued to live below the poverty line...

The housing and houselisting census data do not paint a rosy picture of India in terms of basic amenities for its households. The data on household amenities and assets, released recently by the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, are a stark reminder of the immense disparities that exist in India in terms of basic entitlements such as electricity, sanitation facilities, proper drainage, and clean drinking and...

The Central Bureau of Investigation on Tuesday arrested two senior bureaucrats-former Mumbai civic chief Jairaj Phatak and former Maharashtra information commissioner Ramanand Tiwari-in connection with the Adarsh housing society scam, taking the tally of people taken into custody to nine. The central agency has listed 14 people, including former chief minister Ashok Chavan, as accused in its first information report filed last January. Interrogations of two of the society's arrested promoters,...

It is worrying that the Tendulkar method, chosen by the Planning Commission to calculate the poverty line in its latest figures, underestimates the levels of poverty while overestimating poverty reduction. The figures show that 29.8% or 360 million Indians were poor in 2009-10 as compared to 37.2% or 400 million in 2004-05. A poor person has been defined as one who spends R28 per day in urban areas and R22.5...