-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Backed by better monsoon rains so far as compared to the same period in 2014, the kharif (summer crop) sowing operation has picked up substantially in the last three weeks. The sown area touched 563 lakh hectares as on Friday which is nearly 62% more than what the country had reported at this time last year. The fast pace of sowing raised hopes that the total...
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The measure of poverty -C Rangarajan & S Mahendra Dev
-The Indian Express Estimates based on SECC and NSS data have different purposes. Recently, the government released data from the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) 2011. There has been comment that hereafter, we need not have consumption-based poverty estimates using NSS (National Sample Surveys) data. It is thought that SECC data will alone be enough to estimate poverty and deprivation. Here, we briefly examine the differences between the two and clarify that...
More »Limits of the SECC Data
-Economic and Political Weekly This is not "big data" to be used to cut down welfare expenditure. It was the Ministry of Rural Development which, for close to five years beginning in 2010, designed, planned and oversaw the execution of the 2011 Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC), whose first batch of results were released earlier this month. Yet, it was somewhat unusual to see Union Minister for Finance, Arun Jaitley, rather...
More »The ghost villages of Uttarakhand -Manavi Kapur
-Business Standard The author visits the ghost villages of Uttarakhand and finds out what is prompting people to leave Seven kilometres ahead of Kanatal in the Tehri district, three large boards announce that a slip road is being built under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana. This narrow road leads to Saur, once a bustling village but now eerily silent and desolate. Roofs have caved in and weeds have taken over untended...
More »Somersault in govt plea for Aadhaar
-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Centre today urged the Supreme Court to vacate its two-year-old stay on making Aadhaar cards mandatory for welfare benefits, praising the "tremendous success" of a programme Narendra Modi had trashed as a "scam" while in Opposition. Moving an application in the apex court, the government pleaded that the court stay was hobbling various social-sector programmes, including the direct benefit transfer schemes. It said that while beneficiaries' money was...
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