In Uttar Pradesh's most impoverished region, Bundelkhand, government officials feed off not just the living but also the dead. Headlines Today has exposed how corrupt officials exploit the grieving families of farmers, who have committed suicide. In a visit to Bundelkhand in 2008, AICC general secretary Rahul Gandhi repeated a phrase borrowed from his father Rajiv Gandhi: "Out of 100 paise, only 15 paise reaches the poor". While travelling through this dustbowl...
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Ending Indifference: A Law to Exile Hunger? by Harsh Mander
Can we agree in this country on a floor of human dignity below which we will not allow any human being to fall? No child, woman or man in this land will sleep hungry. No person shall be forced to sleep under the open sky. No parent shall send their child out to work instead of to school. And no one shall die because they cannot afford the cost of...
More »Pension age limit lowered to 60
-The Hindu The Union government on Thursday lowered the age limit for the Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme (IGNOAP) from 65 to 60 years, and increased pension for those above 80 from Rs. 200 to Rs. 500 a month. Both decisions will have retrospective effect from April 1, 2011. The lowering of age will benefit an additional 72.32 lakh people in the age group 60-64, entailing an additional burden of...
More »India's welfare programmes are not very good at reaching the poorest of the poor: World Bank by M Rajshekhar
How effective are India's innumerable social security programmes at reaching out to the poorest of the poor? If a recent World Bank report is anything to go by, they are woefully inefficient. According to the report, titled "Social Protection for a Changing India", leakages and exclusion errors are endemic across the country. For instance, just 27% of the PDS . beenficiaries are the poorest of the poor. The World Bank found...
More »Cash Transfers as the Silver Bullet for Poverty Reduction: A Sceptical Note by Jayati Ghosh
The current perception that cash transfers can replace public provision of basic goods and services and become a catch-all solution for poverty reduction is false. Where cash transfers have helped to reduce poverty, they have added to public provision, not replaced it. For crucial items like food, direct provision protects poor consumers from rising prices and is part of a broader strategy to ensure domestic supply. Problems like targeting errors...
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