-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Eliminating Planning Commission's role in etching the poverty line and instead tasking expert government agencies to determine India's below poverty line population may help depoliticize the exercise, a former top NSSO official has said. Former director-general of National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) Jogeshwar Dash feels the Planning Commission's mandate of framing policy clashes with estimating poverty ratios that are an outcome of strategies the panel devises. "Poverty...

-The Hindu What it signifies, what it does not tell us and what it will definitely not be used for Great shrillness has marked the current furore over the Planning Commission's latest poverty estimates. No surprise, therefore, that understanding and wisdom have flowed in an inverse proportion. Surprising and sad, however, is the fact that some political leaders have at times spoken in a manner deeply hurtful to the aam aadmi and...

-The Hindu Notional poverty line will stand at a per capita expenditure of around Rs. 50 per day in rural areas and Rs. 62 in urban areas While the Opposition pillories the Planning Commission for using a formal definition of poverty that ensures the percentage of people below the poverty line is lower than what it ought to be, the government has begun moving to a broader and more realistic de facto...

-The Hindu Development, price rise and jobs will be the overriding voter concerns in 2014 Lok Sabha poll Results from a nearly 20,000-strong opinion poll conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) for CNN-IBN and The Hindu indicate that ‘development and the economy' and ‘price rise' will dominate voter concerns in 2014. Corruption comes in at a distant fifth, just half as important to voters as ‘development and...

-The Indian Express India is at the point where a low income democracy cannot afford to ignore the hungry Is India's food security ordinance supportable? The debate has been vigorous. It will help to separate the questions of process from those of principle. Whether an ambitious scheme of this magnitude should have been brought in as an executive ordinance or as a new law after parliamentary debate, is basically a procedural question. It...