Government has redefined what constitutes poverty A nationwide survey that will simultaneously map the economic, caste and religious backgrounds of the entire population was approved by the Union Cabinet on Thursday. The survey marks two firsts: firstly, in a break with past practice, the Below Poverty Line (BPL) Census has been widened to include urban areas; earlier, it was restricted to rural India. Secondly, the caste headcount, which will be conducted simultaneously...

-The Economic Times   A day after the Work Bank marked out deficiencies in the country's public distribution system (PDS) for foodgrain, a senior government official has said that restricting public distribution to below poverty line (BPL) households has been a failure in India. "The mess in the public distribution system has been created by the notion that it is only meant for the poor. All problems of the current system are...

-The Hindu   The National Campaign for People's Right to Information has expressed its concern at the reported official move to exclude agencies such as the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the National Investigation Agency (NIA), and the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) from the Right to Information Act. In a statement signed by Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey, Prashant Bhushan, Venkatesh Nayak and Anjali Bharadwaj, among others, the NCPRI described the proposed exclusion...

A Working Group (WG) set up by the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) has drafted a detailed note on land acquisition and relief and rehabilitation which seeks not only to go beyond the pending government bills on the subject, but recommends that the two be merged into a single National Development, Acquisition, Displacement and Rehabilitation Act. Interestingly, it rejects the Haryana model that Congress leaders only too often hold up...

The World Bank has backed a controversial proposal to replace foodgrain allotment under the public distribution system with a system of direct cash transfer. The bank, which supports social security schemes in India, today said poverty reduction had been low and overall returns on spending to eradicate poverty had “not reached their full potential”. It attributed the low reduction to “high leakage” in the PDS system and its weak implementation mechanism. Earlier,...