-The Tribune The UPA's flagship programme MGNREGS changed the employment scene for the rural poor. While 100-day job guarantee was a novel step, loopholes and poor implementation rendered it a liability. The Modi govt hopes to gradually reinvent the scheme, if not entirely scrap it. Midway through the Congress-led UPA's second tenure - believed to be largely the courtesy of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) -...
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Dalits and nutrition: Where is the catch up? -Biraj Swain
-Down to Earth Blog The performance of nutrition indicators amongst Dalits is improving, it is nowhere near the catch-up pace Does a new government and a strong Prime Minister claiming to hail from the backward caste augur Achche Din for Dalits too? We hope so! But political commitment-or lack of it-has multiple manifestations. In a deeply stratified society like India with entrenched elitism, people from the Scheduled Caste (referred to as Dalits...
More »Growth and reforms only way to reduce poverty -Mrityunjay Kumar
-Niti Central According to a report, the Rangarajan committee has retained consumption expenditure as the basis for determining poverty according to which the total number of poor in the country at 36.3 crore or 29.6 per cent of the population. After much public outcry over the UPA's poverty line, another expert panel headed by veteran economist C Rangarajan has come up with a report recommending that those who are spending more than...
More »On the mythology of social policy -Jean Drèze
-The Hindu India is among the world champions of social underspending. Without enlightened social policies, growth mania is unlikely to deliver more under the new government than it did under the previous one Few people today remember the letter written on August 7, 2013 by Mr. Narendra Modi, then Chief Minister of Gujarat, to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In this letter, available on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) website, Mr. Modi criticised...
More »Rangarajan defends poverty estimates
-PTI The expert group headed by the former PMEAC Chairman estimated that the number of poor in India was much higher in 2011-12 at 29.5 % of the population Defending his calculation that three out of 10 in India are poor, former PMEAC Chairman C Rangarajan on Monday said poverty numbers provided by him are not conservative estimates and they are at par with global standards. The expert group headed by Dr. Rangarajan...
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