The RTI juggernaut has begun to roll over Indian babudom. Let us not turn the clock back. Over the past week, there have been reports that the Prime Minister's Office, responding to Sonia Gandhi's muscular intervention, is backing off on the dreaded amendments to the Right to Information Act, 2005. On the other hand, it is worth remembering that the amendments scare has never been too far away. It resurfaced as recently...
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Medicines bought in bulk by govt can help cut costs by Subodh Varma
By spending just Rs 6,000 crore, the government can make a huge dent in the treatment of all sick people across the whole country — currently, people are spending as much as Rs 25,000 crore on buying essential medicines. This was the strong message sent out from a National Consultation organized by several civil society groups at New Delhi on Tuesday. Officials of the health ministry and the Planning Commission...
More »Self-employment scheme suffers from regional disparities by Ruhi Tewari
A decade-old scheme to organize the rural poor into self-help groups and impart training to them has brought hundreds of thousands above the poverty line, says the rural development ministry, which executes the programme. Some 4.5 million people living below the poverty line have been trained under the Swarnjayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana, or SGSY, while 3.5 million self-help groups (SHGs) have been created since its launch in 1999. An evaluation of SGSY...
More »Lessons from BPL Censuses by VK Ramachandran, Y Usami and Biplab Sarkar
To perpetuate a system that assigns a household to a single BPL/APL category in circumstances in which poverty is multi-dimensional is not only bad economics, but unconscionable as well. The pilot surveys for the next Census of BPL (below-poverty-line) households are due to begin. Discussions are now on to finalise the methodology for the survey, and as the BPL Census is a matter of the subsistence and survival of hundreds...
More »Plan panel meet on Food Security Act today by Nitin Sethi & Mahendra Kumar Singh
The argument within the government over how many people should benefit from the proposed National Food Security Act just got more convoluted. The Planning Commission, in a meeting of its members on Saturday, will consider if the country can do with two sets of figures — a lower estimate of poor for the UPA's flagship food scheme and for allocating subsidy, and the Tendulkar committee number for other purposes. The...
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