India’s apex planning body may cap national poverty at 32% for the purpose of calculating welfare benefits in the 12th Five-year Plan that starts on 1 April 2012, it said a day before a meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The development comes on a day the Supreme Court asked Montek Singh Ahluwalia to respond why it should not strike down an earlier cap of 36% poverty after the government sought...

As of 2006, over 43% of Indian children under five were malnourished, a rate that has barely budged since the early 1990s. This gives India the dubious distinction of having the highest percentage of malnourished children in the world. There are at least 53 poorer countries with lower malnutrition rates, including Bangladesh, Nepal, Haiti and several African countries. At Independence, India was poor, so it wasn’t thought possible to guarantee...

“Budget is more than a document of income and expenditure. People expect it to tackle the twin problems of poverty and social injustice while ensuring better income and standard of living.” Country’s first woman Finance Minister of any state government, Upinderjit Kaur, said this while presenting her first budget and last of the present Akali-BJP government on Monday. With the state slated to go to polls early next year, the Rs...

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has imposed a gag on India’s poverty data, saying no information must go out until it is vetted by the Planning Commission. The gag order applies to all central ministries and departments and is apparently triggered by the embarrassment over multiple data on Indians falling under the socially damning Below Poverty Line (BPL). The official line is that the government wants to have uniformity on all data and...

With the number of non-governmental organisations growing in the country, the government is planning to bring them under a regulatory mechanism to make them accountable. As of now, there are no specific laws or regulations to regulate volunteerism in India. A task force, constituted to examine the issues related to the evolution of an independent, national level, self-regulatory agency for the voluntary organisations and develop accreditation methodologies by the Planning Commission,...