-The Hindustan Times The Planning Commission on Tuesday admitted of a serious flaw in the National Sample Survey data and national accounts, which led to pegging the poverty line at Rs 28 per capita daily consumption in cities. Plan panel deputy chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia said the discrepancy between the consumer survey, on whose basis the poverty number were derived, and national accounts was a serious statistical problem. The commission...

-The Hindustan Times The planning commission has released poverty data based on the 66th round of the National Sample Survey (2009-10) on household consumer expenditure survey. According to the new estimate, number of poor in India were 29.8% in 2009-10, down from 37.2% in 2004-05. The data is based on the daily per capita consumption of Rs 28 in urban cities and Rs 22 in rural areas in 2009-10. The same for June...

According to data released Monday by India’s Planning Commission, the number of people living in absolute poverty in India decreased by 12.5% between 2004-2005 and 2009-2010. India’s official poverty rate stands at 29.8%, or close to 350 million people using 2010 population figures, down from around 37.2% or 400 million previously. The announcement was based on an analysis of data gathered from roughly 100,000 households between July 2009 and June 2010,...

In the summer of 2009, farmer Ramesh Dhumale was excited when he got to plant about a kilo of seeds of what was pitched as the country’s first indigenously developed genetically modified (GM) cotton. At Rs 200 a kg, the seeds were far cheaper than the Rs 1,500-2,000 that the other GM cotton seeds cost. But the biggest plus was that the farmers could use and reuse the seeds from successive...

-The Business Standard   Much depends on a strong implementation framework but the imposition of a cap by the Planning Commission could lead to arbitrary exclusions. Himanshu Assistant Professor of Economics, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University The methodology, which is based on the framework suggested by the Saxena Committee, uses indicators that have been refined using a large-scale pilot survey There are over 400 million poor (the number varies depending on which estimate you...