-Networkideas.org The basic income scheme that is in the air these days, which amounts to handing over a certain sum of money to every household to ensure that it reaches a threshold cash income, is an extremely flawed scheme. Instead of enjoining upon the state the obligation to provide essential goods and services like food, education, and health, to its citizens, it absolves the State of all such responsibility, once it...

-TheNewsMinute.com According to Divya Iyer, Mission Director, the beneficiaries under the scheme helped restore several public assets, all of which were rendered useless after the floods. The Kerala floods were a watershed moment for the state and its people in every sense, some for the good and some for the worse. While it claimed several lives and destroyed properties, it also left several people looking for livelihood options. And post the...

-The Hindu The labour force may have actually shrunk while the Modi government has been in office Attuned as we have become to political grandstanding on the purpose of democracy, we may not have imagined that something so prosaic as statistics can alter our perception of how it is actually working for us. The emergence over the past few months of data on employment, speaking precisely the lack of it, cannot but...

-Frontline.in Interview with R.B. Barman, former Chairperson, National Statistical Commission. R.B. Barman, former Chairperson of the National Statistical Commission (NSC), was member of the Indian Statistical Service before joining the Reserve Bank of India in 1979. He was president of the Indian Econometric Society in 2006-07, Vice Chairman, Irving Fisher Committee on Central Bank Statistics, Bank for International Settlement, Basel, Switzerland, and Member, International Data Forum. He sent a paper to Prime...

-The Indian Express My resignation from National Statistical Commission was the last act in a long story of disregard for its reports William Setzer, in the working paper, “Politics and Statistics: Independence, Dependence or Interaction”, published by the UN, lists several possible areas where political interference in official data generation and publication can happen. One of these is the extent and timing of release of data. He cites several examples. Most...