-The Indian Express To reduce poverty, India needs to concentrate on promoting healthcare and education of the poor It is sometimes argued that a country such as India, aiming to eliminate absolute poverty, should only be concerned about economic growth, and not worry about inequality. Is that right? Yes, growth is (typically) good for the poor but it is no less true that inequality is (typically) bad for the poor. There is little...
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The poverty quibble-Latha Jishnu
-Down to Earth Government claims a huge drop in poverty numbers but critical indicators-health, malnutrition and wages-continue to be grim. So how did the poor fare better? After a long, long time there was good news to splash as media led with the report of a record 21.9 per cent drop in poverty levels. The July 24 newspaper headlines were celebratory as they reported the Planning Commission's findings that poverty rates...
More »Facing flak, govt to revise poverty line benchmark
-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The government will soon revise the contentious poverty line upward from Rs 27.20 in rural areas and Rs 33.40 in urban areas after it receives the report of the Rangarajan committee that is examining the validity of the current yardstick. Minister of state for planning Rajeev Shukla told TOI the government was in the process of re-evaluating the poverty line in a bid to make it...
More »Nitish Kumar writes to Prime Minister seeking higher wages under NREGA -Urmi A Goswami
-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar is leveraging his politically 'unattached' status to seek higher wages for his people under the Centre's rural employment guarantee scheme. Kumar, being wooed by the Congress after he parted ways with the BJP, has written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh saying that the state plans to raise NREGA payments to align them with the statutory minimum wage. "Notification of lower wage rates...
More »What the poverty numbers don’t say -Bhaskar Dutta
-The Indian Express What caused the steep fall in poverty reported by the Planning Commission? The evidence is mixed Earlier this week, the Planning Commission released estimates of the incidence of poverty in 2011-12. As in virtually the entire literature on the measurement of poverty in India, these estimates are based on data on per capita consumption expenditure collected by the National Sample Survey Organisation. The estimates show that there has been...
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