-TheWire.in A recent research paper examining consumption expenditure and landholdings in Uttar Pradesh sheds new light. Mumbai: For years, researchers and academics have studied how wealth and income inequality in India is, more often than not, split along caste lines, with upper castes cornering a larger piece of the pie. However, the measure of their enrichment and the consequent impoverishment and exclusion of Muslim Dalits and Hindu Dalits has received less attention. A...

After the release of the second phase data of the National Family Health Survey Fifth Round (NFHS-5), media commentators and experts have written that the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) for India has gone down just below the replacement-level fertility. The TFR for the entire nation was 2.2 in 2015-16, which decreased to 2.0 in 2019-21.   According to the United Nations, the replacement-level fertility is reached when the TFR of a...

-Down to Earth NFHS counts only certain women, who belong to specific demographic categories. There is a bias in it, say experts There are 1,020 women per 1,000 men in India according to the recently released Fifth Edition of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5). Such a sex ratio has not been recorded in any of the previous four editions of the NFHS. But demography experts say it is not the time...

The virility of Muslim men vis-à-vis men from other religious communities have often been used as a political tool and to create a divisive agenda just before elections for getting votes from the majority of the Indian electorate who are Hindus. Instead of focusing on positive agendas like human development, employment generation, and poverty reduction, political campaigns just before the elections oftentimes reduce to mere communal propaganda (when a lot...

-ThePrint.in ISEC Bangalore researchers studied NFHS data to find that out-of-pocket expenditure for a normal delivery at a public facility is higher for rural households (Rs 5,368) than urban (Rs 4,330). Maternal and child healthcare services in India – including antenatal care, natal care (institutional delivery, or births delivered in a medical facility), postnatal care, and childcare – are meant to be free of cost in public health facilities. Several policies and...