Uttar Pradesh, which supposedly has a high proportion of the country's poor, has not begun the job of enumerating them even three-and-a-half months after the first deadline set by the Centre lapsed. The project started in June 2011, with the target of completing the job by the end of 2011. The Centre then extended the deadline to April. Bihar has covered just 0.1% of the population. While there is no word from...

-AFP The Asian Development Bank (ADB) Monday urged regional governments to tackle rising income inequality with more urgency, warning any delay could undermine social cohesion and economic growth. Rajat Nag, ADB's managing director-general, said failing to address the problem now could spark further dissatisfaction and lead governments to resort to populist measures to appease their citizens. But populist measures like fuel subsidies and cash grants are taxing on state coffers and could result...

A moratorium is not the magic bullet that can slay Bengal’s fiscal demons, several economists have said, pointing out that postponing the inevitable will be of little use unless backed up by a revenue mobilisation road map. Chief minister Mamata Banerjee had yesterday set a 15-day deadline for the Centre to announce a three-year moratorium on the payment of interest on the loans Bengal had taken. “A moratorium on repayment obligations can...

How an image-fixated chief minister has bent the state’s media to his will If you haven’t heard of an income tax raid on the residential premises of Nitish Kumar’s close aide and treasurer of the ruling Janata Dal-United (JD-U), Vinay Kumar Sinha, you are not alone. Thanks to the local media, it took a while even in Patna—where the house is located—for people to get to know. This, incidentally, is the...

The Planning Commission drew flak when it calculated that if an urban person spent 28 per head every day and someone in rural areas spent 22, that was enough to consider them to be above the poverty line. These figures are based on consumption expenditure data collected in the 66th round of NSSO for 2009-10. From these new estimates, using the Tendulkar Committee methodology, the number of poor in 2009-10 was...