Statistical poverty lines should not become real-life eligibility criteria for food entitlements.  Nothing is easier than to recognise a poor person when you see him or her. Yet the task of identifying and counting the poor seems to elude the country's best experts. Take for instance the “headcount” of rural poverty — the proportion of the rural population below the poverty line. At least four alternative figures are available: 28...

The Centre has drafted a health bill to ensure the right to health. However, health experts feel the bill will, instead, legitimise denial of health services to the poor. The Draft National Health Bill 2009 was prepared on the recommendations of the National Human Rights Commission to recognise and operationalise the right to healthcare. The demand for such a right was led by the Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, the Indian chapter...

Monica Das Gupta is a senior social scientist at the World Bank. Her field research in Punjab, when she was at the National Council of Applied Economic Research, established that sex differentials in child mortality in rural Punjab persisted despite relative wealth, socio-economic development including rapid universalization of female education, fertility decline, and mortality decline. Amartya Sen’s writings drew attention to female foeticide and infanticide in Asia that led to...

The agriculture ministry’s revised farm output projections for this year, indicating just about a 7.5 per cent downturn in foodgrain production despite the worst drought in recent years, lend themselves to some significant inferences. For one, the performance of the crops has turned out to be far better than what was feared. The earlier projections, released in November last, had put the likely crop loss at over 21 million tonnes,...

Surging food inflation, decline in agriculture growth rate and the impending food security bill are expected to be at the centre of the coming Union budget. With a bumper wheat harvest expected this rabi, there are projections of a turnaround in the farm sector from the present growth rate of 0.2 per cent. Food prices, which grew at an unprecedented rate of nearly 20 per cent in January, are expected...