Argumentative Indians are at it again! After sparring over the poverty line and the actual number of poor, India's renowned economists have fired up a fresh debate over the extent of malnutrition. In the earlier debate, the Planning Commission ‘reduced' poverty on paper disregarding NSSO and official committees, including the NCEUS, which determined that 77% Indians survived on less than Rs 20 a day. Columbia university economist Arvind Panagariya has...

-Frontline The Central government's proposal to hand over the supply of supplementary nutrition to NGOs in the name of "community participation" is surely an invitation for private profiteering on the back of this supposedly public scheme. ENSURING safe and healthy conditions for the reproduction of the population is obviously the most fundamental requirement of any society. So the progress of a society can be determined (and indeed is routinely judged) by the...

-The Times of India The new office will give real time analysis of the government's social programmes, says Jairam Ramesh At a time when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government is facing flak for a series of alleged corruption scams, the ministry of rural development that has an annual budget of approximately ` 800 billion has decided to go ahead and create an office of concurrent evaluation. The proposal for a...

-The Times of India The Prime Minister's Office (PMO) faced its sharpest indictment in the Supreme Court on Wednesday, with a senior official's visit to the CBI office to scan and suggest changes to an investigation report on Coalgate attracting the court's severe ire. The court's scathing comments on Shatrughna Singh, a joint secretary in the PMO, and Ashok Bhalla, a joint secretary in the coal ministry, seeking changes in a draft...

-The Hindu   Kozhikode: An audit report of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has slammed the State government for non-performance and poor maintenance of records in implementing the scheme from 2007 to 2012. The performance audit report, prepared by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) and tabled in Parliament on Tuesday, revealed "delays ranging from four to six years in framing rules.'' "There were significant variations between...