In the absence of income or expenditure-based headcount ratio, the growth in the real wages (i.e., nominal wages adjusted against retail inflation) of the manual workers is considered to be a good proxy to assess the trends in poverty. This is because the manual, unskilled/ semi-skilled labourers exist at the bottom of the pyramid or economic hierarchy, and most of them belong to the social categories Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...

-The Hindu As ‘Writing with Fire’ competes at the Oscars, filmmakers Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh look back on why they decided to follow three Dalit journalists for five years Six years ago, when New Delhi-based filmmakers Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh attended a meeting at the Khabar Lahariya office in Chitrakoot, Uttar Pradesh, they had no idea how deeply engaged they would soon get with the lives and work of the...

-The Hindu The decimation of BSP has hurt the SP chief the most in polls, say observers For somebody who threw the kitchen sink at the Bharatiya Janta Party during the election campaign, it has been a humbling loss for Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh. Observers said everybody knew that nobody could defeat the BJP on the Hindutva pitch but Mr. Yadav got a ‘godsend opportunity’ in the form of...

-The Telegraph Akhilesh Yadav is trying to win over segments of these communities, and the extent of his success in the effort may decide his fate on March 10 Ghazipur (on UP-Delhi border), Mirzapur: Ramashankar Yadav, a retired block development officer chatting with fellow villagers at a tea shop in the Madhuban market, looks up suspiciously. “I hope you aren’t from the godi (lapdog) media?” he asks, referring to media outlets seen widely...

-TheWeek.in Well-off are doing fine; stagflation confined to middle and lower-middle classes Kaushik Basu, former chief economic adviser to the government and former chief economist of the World Bank, is currently teaching at Cornell University in the US. In an exclusive interaction, he talks about the current challenges before the Indian economy and its future growth prospects. Excerpts: Q/ Is the Indian economy moving in the right direction? A/ The performance of the Indian...