-The Telegraph Union health ministry asserts that Civil Registration System figures should be considered 'authentic' A table on “estimated deaths” is missing from India’s annual birth-and-death report for 2020. The absence has fuelled fresh questions about how the Union health ministry calculated that authorities had registered 99.9 per cent of the country’s deaths in 2020, the Covid-19 outbreak’s first year. A 99.9 per cent registration level would mean the country had recorded almost all...

-The Telegraph There is no escaping climate crisis, but concerted efforts may ensure loss of life is minimum The Sunderbans in West Bengal, along with several districts in Odisha and Tamil Nadu, are the most vulnerable to high storm surges induced by cyclones, according to the Climate Hazards and Vulnerability Atlas of India released by the ministry of earth sciences recently. The atlas aims to help mitigate the effects of the 13...

-The Hindu Study by Libtech India blames official apathy for improper bank account linkage HYDERABAD (Telangana): A total of 4.7 lakh farmers in Telangana have not received either part or full benefits under the PM Kisan Samman Nidhi scheme, a study by Libtech India, a research group, found. Under the scheme modelled after Rythu Bandhu scheme of the Telangana government, the Central government is transferring ₹6,000 annual benefit each to eligible farmers in three...

-TheWire.in There is a need to set right the ‘national multidimensional poverty index’ framework to capture the true story of deprivation. The global sustainable development agenda demands that countries measure the population living in poverty and reduce it by at least half by 2030. So, in order to monitor progress on this critical development indicator, UNDP and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) compute what is called the ‘Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI)’...

-TheWire.in A claim of an 8.4% real GDP growth rate has little relevance even as rural India battles plummeting wage levels, depleted incomes and widespread unemployment. With the release of the GDP figures for the quarter ending September, the government machinery has been in full swing advancing the narrative that economic growth is indeed back on track. However, sorely missing from these narratives is the inconvenient factoid on the currently dismal state of...