-The Hindu How much and what people eat and what work they do differs significantly by caste, new data from the National Sample Survey Office show. However, these differences are likely to be correlated, rather than caused by caste. The NSSO released two new reports this week: one on household consumption expenditure by a social group and the other on employment and unemployment by a social group. The data show that...

-Outlook Corporate karza maafi reaches new heights, social spending new lows This year's budget write-off in customs duty on gold, diamonds and jewellery (all aam aadmi items, of course) is Rs 75,592 crore. That's well over twice the "record" amount allocated to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. As Prof Jayati Ghosh points out, the MNREGA has given billions of person-days of work to tens of millions of poor...

The India Country Report 2015 on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) comes at a time when the Union Budget 2015-16 allegedly cut expenditure on several social sector schemes and programmes. This year's MDG country report says that India will fail to achieve two important targets pertaining to reducing hunger and maternal mortality by 2015, among others. Released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), the report says that India is...

-The Hindu Business Line   Will the growth-versus-distribution debate finally be settled in favour of the former? There are few areas of settled concord in economic theory. That the dynamic of power is often determinant in the limited enclaves of consent has been evident in recent times in the growth-versus-distribution debate. Residual doubts about the tilt of current policy were laid to rest with the Economic Survey for 2014-15. In this assessment of the...

-The Hindu Much of the National Health Policy document reads like a report of health issues and systemic challenges, and is sorely wanting on policy detail Health impoverishment - falling into poverty due to health care costs - affects 63 million individuals in India every year. This is a damning statistic, especially when read with the fact that 18 per cent of all households face catastrophic health expenditures (health expenditure greater than...