The Supreme Court today slammed the Centre for sticking to the below-poverty-line estimates of the 1991 census in distributing PDS grain when preliminary figures for the 2010-11 census, showing a much higher number of BPL families, are available. The judges also criticised the income cap fixed by the government to determine families below the poverty line (BPL) by suggesting it was outdated. The 1991 census showed 36 per cent of the population...
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Child poverty and education by DP Chaudhuri & Raghbendra Jha
A decline of 2.6 million in elementary education enrolments from 2007 to 2010, the years of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan's trumpeted success, needs careful analysis. Enrolment data, based on school statistics, deals with the supply-side only. census or NSS data , based on household information, gives us the demand-side of school enrolments. The two should roughly match, as they do in half of India, but not for UP, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh,...
More »Court rejects plea for disclosure of Sonia's religion under RTI
The Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a petition seeking a direction to the census officer to disclose information on the “religion and faith” of Congress president Sonia Gandhi and her children Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi. A Bench of Justices R.V. Raveendran and A.K. Patnaik dismissed the petition filed by the former DGP of Haryana, P.C. Wadhwa, challenging a judgment of the Punjab and Haryana High Court that held personal information...
More »Only 6% of doctors held for sex-selection practices convicted by Kounteya Sinha
Only around 6% of cases filed against doctors involved in sex-selection practices in the 17 states, which have the most skewed sex ratio, have ended up in convictions till date. According to Union health ministry's latest data — prepared for a crucial meeting of health secretaries of the 17 states on Wednesday — a total of 805 cases have been filed in court against doctors till March 31, ever since the...
More »Too many in India by Alaka M Basu
Late last month we received the exciting news that India now has a population of 1.21 billion. This figure generated less discussion than I expected. Maybe it would have been more mind-boggling a few months ago, before all the scams and scandals inured us to the large number of zeros that a billion signifies. Or maybe we were distracted by the other bad news in the census results — the...
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