The government is likely to raise the income threshold to define the economically weaker section (EWS) to about Rs 6,000 a month from the current Rs 3,300 a month. This will increase EWS numbers by almost 40 per cent. The EWS population benefits from government housing schemes and gets softer interest rates on housing loans from state-owned banks. The move to hike the threshold is based on an internal report...

Statistical poverty lines should not become real-life eligibility criteria for food entitlements.  Nothing is easier than to recognise a poor person when you see him or her. Yet the task of identifying and counting the poor seems to elude the country's best experts. Take for instance the “headcount” of rural poverty — the proportion of the rural population below the poverty line. At least four alternative figures are available: 28...

India has notified education as a fundamental right for all children between 6 and 14 years, enabling them and their parents to legally demand schooling from the government for the academic session beginning April 1. Eight years after Parliament amended the Constitution recognising education as a fundamental right, the government has finally notified the amendment and a law was passed last year to make the right a reality. The notification,...

Monica Das Gupta is a senior social scientist at the World Bank. Her field research in Punjab, when she was at the National Council of Applied Economic Research, established that sex differentials in child mortality in rural Punjab persisted despite relative wealth, socio-economic development including rapid universalization of female education, fertility decline, and mortality decline. Amartya Sen’s writings drew attention to female foeticide and infanticide in Asia that led to...

Finally, they have bitten the bullet on fertiliser subsidy. For the past three years, the Union government has agonised on the issue of mounting expenditure on this account and has not had the courage to cut the subsidy. While Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee announced his intent to introduce a nutrient-based subsidy (NBS) in his last Budget Speech, he has finally shown courage to do so on the eve of this...