-Livemint.com A leaked NSO survey report says that expenditure by consumers across India actually fell over a six-year span till 2017-18. This is at odds with our GDP data. So what explains this finding? Is Indian consumption in decline? Anecdotal evidence has pointed that way for some time. But now, a leaked survey report of the National Statistical Office (NSO), published on Friday in Business Standard, seems to confirm suspicions of such...

-Financial Express The government’s proposed Unnati scheme, if it works as planned, offers MGNREGA beneficiaries a ticket out of the programme, and, in the long run, out of poverty. It has been clear for a long time that MGNREGA is barely the poverty reduction tool it is often made out to be; at Rs 204 per day per person, the average wage rate across the country is too low to sustain a...

-The Tribune A serious methodological flaw of the RCT approach that has been pointed out by ethnographic studies of poverty is that its overemphasis on quantitative method has deprived it of the insights of qualitative methods. There is some recognition of the flaw by admitting that a mixed method approach can be useful, but the approach remains hostile to qualitative methods. THE award of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics to Abhijit...

-The Hindu Why the right to Internet access and digital literacy should be recognised as a right in itself Recently, in Faheema Shirin v. State of Kerala, the Kerala High Court declared the right to Internet access as a fundamental right forming a part of the right to privacy and the right to education under Article 21 of the Constitution. While this is a welcome move, it is important to recognise the...

Almost one in every five suicides in the world is committed by self-poisoning with pesticide, which mostly occur in rural, agricultural areas of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), states a new publication entitled 'Preventing Suicide: A resource for pesticide registrars and regulators'. Published jointly by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the booklet says that the adoption of green revolution technology...