Even as India once more self-declares its “arrival on the world stage” with a symbol for the Indian rupee, a global assessment presents a depressing picture of India’s actual economic performance. In a study whose conclusions were to be expected, the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHDI) has revealed that an appropriate index of poverty (and deprivation) finds its incidence in India and elsewhere to be much greater than...

The official line is simple. Since we cannot afford to feed all the hungry, there must only be as many hungry as we can afford to feed. There was irony in the timing of the petrol price decontrol order. The decision, which also covered major hikes in diesel and kerosene prices, and affects hundreds of millions of people, came even as Manmohan Singh advised world leaders in Toronto on the need...

India is expected to reduce its poverty rate from 51 per cent in 1990 to 24 per cent in 2015, slashing the number of extremely poor by 188 million. But progress in the rest of South Asia is not sufficient to halve the level of poverty by that target date, according to a United Nations report on the Millennium Development Goals for 2010. The sharpest reductions worldwide continue to be recorded...

Even before the food and financial crises hit the world, prevalence of hunger in South Asia was increasing instead of decreasing, taking the region further away from the goal of reducing hunger by half by 2015, according to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals report, 2010. The report says in 2005-2007, the proportion of undernourished people in South Asia had swelled to levels last seen in 1990. The prevalence of...

A couple of years ago a colleague came into my office with what he thought was a definite typographic error: “It says that India won only three medals in the Olympics; that cannot be right — there is a billion people in India.” I had to break it to him that this was actually the most medals India ever won in a single Olympic game. India has an average of...