Officials may pocket the wage increases, but the wage level in MGNREGA seems just enough to induce workers to turn up. This year marks the sixth anniversary of the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), India's landmark right-to-work programme. The Act guarantees 100 days of paid employment to every rural household in India (up to 850 million people), regardless of eligibility criteria, and establishes the government's...

There is no case whatsoever to construct a single poverty line based on a calorie or expenditure norm; all such lines are arbitrary and do not take into account the different dimensions of poverty. It is far better to focus on disaggregated information on a variety of parameters – education, housing, clothing, health, etc – which can give us unambiguous information about the different facets of poverty over the course...

In the mid-eighties there was a rumour which later turned out to be true: US livestock were being fed with foodgrains in order to ensure better quality of their meat. Later it proved to be corn and not fine cereals like wheat and rice. The Indian intelligentsia was appalled and indignant: How come cows and buffaloes were fed with grains while millions of people continued to live below the poverty line...

The media's failure to recruit Dalits is a betrayal of the constitutional guarantees of equality and fraternity. There were almost none in 1992, and there are almost none today: Dalits in the newsrooms of India's media organisations. Stories from the lives of close to 25 per cent of Indians (Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes) are unlikely to be known — much less broadcast or written about. Unless, of course, the stories are...

-The Wall Street Journal These days, Indian policymakers are debating how to create a vast new food entitlement program. There is talk of poor households struggling to cope with high food prices and malnourishment among their children. What you don’t hear much about, however, is the most tragic and outrageous consequence of India’s failure to feed its people adequately: starvation deaths. India is a nation that prides itself on having been self-sufficient in...