-CNN-IBN Kottayam, the first town in the country to experiment with total literacy programme, the first to have a printing press in the state and the first to have a college in the state, is in the limelight again. The first-ever Manav Vikas India Human Development Award instituted by the Planning Commission and the UNDP zeroed in on the Kottayam District Human Development Report for its excellent quality of analysis. The report was...

The Planning Commission is back in the news. The latest round of poverty levels that have been disclosed have created another debate in the country. Once more, people are stunned at the meager rate of Rs 28 that has been defined as the poverty line. Even though I addressed some apprehensions in an earlier post, this time around the issue seems to be more about myths, perceptions and lack of...

Inequality in India is worsening and clearly following the US pattern India is a “relatively low-income inequality country” – to borrow an expression from a World Bank publication – when compared to China or Brazil, but there is no doubt that disparities have been widening of late. Planning Commission officials have admitted that inequality has risen in the first decade of the new millennium, although the factors responsible for it need...

-Economic and Political Weekly   Budget 2012, built yet again at the altar of fiscal fundamentalism, will not convince anybody. In this era of immediate assessment it took just a few minutes for the Union Budget for 2012-13 to be given one or the other negative appellation – “lacklustre”, “anti-growth”, “back to the 1980s”, “without reform” and the like. Such evaluations forget that union budgets have long since ceased to be statements of...

-PTI The poverty level in Sikkim has gone down with 80,000 people now living below poverty line, according to the new official estimates for 2009-2010 released by the Planning Commission. While in 2004-2005, poverty level in Sikkim stood at 30.9 per cent with 1,70,000 people living under BPL, in the wake of the intense poverty alleviation programme initiated by the government, it has been significantly reduced in both urban and rural areas,...