-IndiaSpend.com Dimlarpar (Bodoland Territorial Council), Assam: It was a rainy September afternoon in this remote village in Baksa, a district of the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) in western Assam. Outside a small tin-roofed mud house, Santi Rani Chand, a frail 72-year-old clad in a white saree, sat on a wooden bench recalling her youngest son’s suicide. Binay Chand, 32, had hanged himself from a mango tree in a neighbour’s backyard in September...

For long, economists have argued among themselves whether income should be the only criterion for measuring poverty. After all, in real life a person can face multiple deprivations, say, in terms of access to education, health and living standards, among others. The multidimensional poverty index (MPI), which offers a valuable complement to traditional income-based poverty measures, was first introduced in the 2010 Human Development Report (HDR). The MPI looks at...

-The Hindu JPC members want bangladesh to be excluded. As the deadline for a joint committee of Parliament on the contentious Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, nears an end, some members asked whether it was possible to present the Bill in a truncated form by excluding bangladesh. The Bill proposes citizenship to persecuted Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians and Buddhists from Pakistan, Afghanistan and bangladesh who came to India before 2014. Violation of equality The...

-The Hindu Business Line Roy tracks how microfinance, despite its blemishes, has empowered the unbanked in the country For the poor in rural India, till not very long ago, credit meant the unscrupulous mahajans who roamed the villages with wads of cash. Dime a dozen Bollywood movies had depicted the wily moneylender who not just ripped off the hapless creditors, but who was also cruel enough to grab their movable and immovable...

  Like last year, this year too journalists and media persons have compared India's Global Hunger Index (GHI) ranking vis-à-vis its position in previous years. Even the social media is buzzing with commentaries on the fallen GHI ranking of the country. The question remains whether such a comparison is possible. The newly released report entitled 2018 Global Hunger Index: Forced Migration and Hunger clearly says that the GHI scores are comparable within...