Economists often tell the story about the drunk, the coin and the lamp-post. A drunk is searching around a lamp-post for a coin. On being asked where he dropped it, he waves unsteadily in the darkness beyond reach of the lamp-post’s light. Why not look there? Because, he tells you, the light’s over here. The point, for economists, is that our approach to problems is frequently warped by what data...

Marie Antoinette, the liberal and concerned queen of France, on seeing the poor and hungry masses demanding bread, said in a fit of charity — “let them eat cake”. Member of the prestigious National Advisory Council (NAC) Jean Dreze surveyed the performance of the existing National Food For Work Programme (NFFWP) in July 2005 and concluded that the performance was “alarming”. The work guidelines were not being enforced, and the...

The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India has found that the Food and Civil Supplies Department of the State neither conducted any survey for identification of beneficiaries nor followed the survey conducted by the Panchayat and Rural Development Department in 1998-99, to select the beneficiaries of the Below Poverty Line (BPL) for the Public Distribution System (PDS). The status as of September 2007, as per the BPL census of 2002,...

Inflation is beginning to hurt seriously, corruption is at an all-time high and the government is not doing enough to tackle either problem. That is the way India's big cities feel on the two big issues dominating headlines in recent months, according to an 8-city survey done exclusively for TOI. Asked what impact rising prices have had on their household budgets, only 3% said it has had a small impact. About...

There are many critics and sceptics with respect to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which came into being because of political pressure that managed to overcome quite strenuous opposition from some of the most influential policy making circles. It is likely that much of this criticism is not really because of the declared reasons, like fiscal costs (which are thus far very little) and potential leakage. Rather,...