Today is the ''International Day for the Eradication of Poverty'', so it an appropriate day to note how necessary it still is to emphasise this concern among Indian policy makers. Sadly, lack of official awareness is evident in all sorts of recent policy measures, for example in the cynicism of increasing oil prices that feed into all other prices with cascading effects, even when inflation has already imposed huge burdens on...

Are millions of Indians being forced to leave their villages for cities and towns because there aren't enough jobs at home and farm incomes are drying up? Is this "distress migration" unprecedented in India's history? Award-winning journalist P Sainath thinks so. Examining the latest census data, he finds that India's urban population has risen more (91 million more than in the 2001 census) than the rural population (90.6 million more than...

-The Economic Times   More than 25 of the top economists of the country have written an open letter against the Planning Commission poverty line and said that the public distribution system should be universalized. "We do not consider the official national poverty lines set by the Planning Commission, at Rs 32 and Rs 26 per capita per day for urban and rural areas respectively, to be acceptable benchmarks to measure the extent...

In a significant move, prominent economists on Monday made a forceful plea to delink food entitlements from the “faulty” poverty measures put out by the Planning Commission. Asserting that under-nutrition was much more widespread in the country than income poverty “however defined,” the economists sought restoration of the universal Public Distribution System (PDS) “as the best way forward'' in combating hunger and poverty. “This is not only feasible within the available fiscal...

IN preparing the approach paper to the Twelfth Five Year Plan, the Planning Commission engaged “all interested persons” in the country in a wide, web-based consultative exercise and also involved a varied group of “stakeholders”. The resulting document clearly indicates some awareness of the complex problems likely to be faced by the economy in the coming period. But it falls short of expectations because it does not provide a cohesive...