-The Business Standard Peg decline at 7.8 percentage points between 2009-10 and 2011-12 The poverty rate has declined by 7.8 percentage points in two years, according to the latest estimates by the Planning Commission. If 29.8 per cent of the population was poor in 2009-10, the figure came down to 22 per cent in 2011-12. The estimates are based on the recently-released report by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) for 2011-12. This...

-The Hindu The recent launch of the first Dalit venture fund occasions an examination of the moral and ethical emptiness of capitalism History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics B.R. Ambedkar If only Milind Kamble, founder of the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DICCI) and Chandra Bhan Prasad, Dalit thinker, columnist and DICCI mentor, had imbibed the wisdom of Manning Marable's How Capitalism Underdeveloped...

-Down to Earth About nine million women went out of the job market in the rural areas between 2009-10 and 2011-12, a grim facet of the employment crisis in the countryside The dismal trend in India's jobless growth story was reinforced when the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) of the ministry of statistics and programme implementation released the highlights of its 68th round of its surveys, conducted from July 2011 to June...

-The Hindu     In spite of the rosy picture painted by the World Bank, the prospect of eliminating extreme poverty remains distant In a protracted period of gloom and persistent recession with feeble signs of recovery in a large part of the developed world, the World Bank, Brookings Institution and others can be forgiven for their euphoria over the accomplishment of a key Millennium Development Goal (MDG) - of halving extreme poverty in...

-The United Nations A United Nations report released today stresses the importance of providing meals for schoolchildren, particularly in times of crisis, and notes that this is still lacking in many developing countries. "School feeding assures that where quality education is available, children are able to take advantage of the opportunity to learn," said the Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP), Ertharin Cousin. "It's an investment that pays off in the...