The Planning Commission, headed by the prime minister, has filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court quantifying the daily poverty line for an adult as Rs 26 in rural, and Rs 32 in urban India. At today’s relentlessly increasing prices, Rs 26 will not get a manual worker even one nutritious meal a day — leave alone the 2,400 calories he is required to eat to enable him to work,...

-San Francisco Chronicle   Bihar's chief minister, Nitish Kumar, who runs India's poorest and one of its most corrupt regions, announced a novel bid to tackle endemic poverty: taking the state's bureaucrats out of governing. His administration placed advertisements in newspapers this week, seeking a team of professionals to manage a $1.3 billion annual budget for programs involving job creation, housing, infrastructure and microfinance. In Bihar, a state of 103 million people in...

As leaders from two of the world's largest financial institutions, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, met for annual meetings here Tuesday, a delegation of activists from India called on the World Bank to follow through with its proposal to dramatically cut funding for coal-burning power stations. Over the next few days, the delegation will travel from Washington to West Virginia where, in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains, activists...

-BBC   India's main planning body has said half a dollar a day is "adequate" for a villager to spend on food, education and health. Critics say that the amount fixed by the Planning Commission is extremely low and aimed at "artificially" reducing the number of poor who are entitled to state benefits. There are various estimates on the exact number of poor in India. Officially, 37% of India's 1.21bn people live below the poverty...

-The Times of India   Shooting down anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare's suggestion for introducing right to recall in elections, chief election commissioner S Y Quraishi on Wednesday said the move will destabilize the system and was 'impractical'. "Right to recall is not easy in a country where candidates are voted in by lakhs of voters," he said. He feared that if the right to recall is put in place, "elections will go on...