Soon, the National Food Security Act  will become law. The ruling United Progressive Alliance flagship social security programme of providing every Below the Poverty Line (BPL) family with 25 kg of rice or wheat at Rs 3 per kg per month is a welcome step to alleviate some of the human trauma that haunts the poor in our country. The government also hopes that the Act will secure freedom from...

Latin America, the poster child of bad economic policy in the 1980s and early 1990s, is leading the way in one rapidly evolving area of social development: conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes. These schemes provide cash payments to poor households that meet certain behavioural requirements, generally related to children’s healthcare and education. The idea here is to support minimal levels of consumption through income transfers, while encouraging long-term human development. The...

‘Without electricity, social and economic development is much more difficult.' More than $36 billion a year is needed to ensure that the world's population benefits from access to electricity and clean-burning cooking facilities by 2030, the International Energy Agency said on September 21. In a report prepared for the U.N. Millennium Development Goals meeting in New York, the agency said the goal of eradicating extreme poverty by 2015 would be possible only...

In the last few years in different parts of India the issue of land acquisition has become politically explosive.  This isn’t surprising as land, one of the few assets possessed by large numbers of people, particularly in rural India, is rising disproportionately in potential value as commercial and industrial development picks up, as there is never a dearth of real estate magnates, land speculators, local mafia, their political patrons and...

Now that it’s Millennium Development Goal (MDG) week, expect a host of studies/ articles/ commentaries around how India has failed to meet the important MDGs, on how parts of India are worse than sub-Saharan Africa or Bangladesh when it comes to nutrition, and so on. The UN set the ball rolling when it said that “with just five years to the 2015 deadline for achieving the MDGs, the country as a...