The current perception that cash transfers can replace public provision of basic goods and services and become a catch-all solution for poverty reduction is false. Where cash transfers have helped to reduce poverty, they have added to public provision, not replaced it. For crucial items like food, direct provision protects poor consumers from rising prices and is part of a broader strategy to ensure domestic supply. Problems like targeting errors...
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Survey on AYUSH
-The Hindu For the first time, the Union government will carry out a survey on the use and acceptability of the alternative systems of medicine and employ the results for effective planning of a road map for Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy (AYUSH). The National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) has agreed to include some questions, in its Consumer Expenditure Schedule for the 68th annual round of socio-economic surveys, for collecting...
More »The siren song of cash transfers by Jayati Ghosh
Cash transfers cannot and should not replace the public provision of essential goods and services, but rather supplement them. Cash transfers are the latest fad of the international development industry, as the preferred strategy for poverty reduction. And now Indian policymakers are busy catching up. The idea was mooted in the Government's Economic Survey for 2010-11, and the Finance Minister made an explicit announcement in his budget speech for replacing some...
More »Wages of tokenism by TK Rajalakshmi
The revised daily wage for NREGS workers is still lower than the minimum wages paid in several States. A CONTROVERSY seems to have surfaced between the Prime Minister's Office and the National Advisory Council (NAC) on the issue of wages under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). The NAC has been arguing for some time that there should be parity between wages under the National Rural Employment...
More »‘9.4% unemployed, agriculture accounts for less than half of all jobs’ by Amitav Ranjan
A first-ever survey by the Labour Bureau under the Union Ministry of Labour has shown that chronic unemployment — being jobless for more than six months — in India for 2009-10 stands at 9.4 per cent of the population, more than thrice the 2.8 per cent estimated by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO). The survey was conducted in 300 districts among the 28 states and union territories with working class...
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