-Down to Earth In the 1990s, non-profits and farmers themselves built check dams; today, the government does it, without proper research or site selection Fifty-four-year old Dineshbhai Babariya has just harvested a 20 quintal cotton crop, his second harvest in the last one year in his four bigha (1.6 acre) farm in the Jasapar village of Gujarat’s Saurashtra region. August 2018 was the last time the village in Rajkot district received around 228...

-The Hindu Ill fares the land where wealth accumulates, and the social and natural environment suffer As the general elections approach, it would be politic to take stock of the progress made by the incumbent party and look out for the areas that call for particular attention by the one that gains power. Without anticipating complete agreement on the indicators that ought to be used, I look at the changes since 2014...

-Firstpost.com Faring last on every quantifiable social parameter in the country, MP’s Alirajpur sees a different style of campaigning. Alirajpur (MP): It is hard to figure as one moves through the lanes of Alirajpur, located in the far west corner of Madhya Pradesh, that it will vote with the rest of the state on Wednesday. There are no political billboards to be seen in the town, no vehicles move around with party flags...

For long, economists have argued among themselves whether income should be the only criterion for measuring poverty. After all, in real life a person can face multiple deprivations, say, in terms of access to education, health and living standards, among others. The multidimensional poverty index (MPI), which offers a valuable complement to traditional income-based poverty measures, was first introduced in the 2010 Human Development Report (HDR). The MPI looks at...

-Livemint.comThere is a growing recognition among policymakers of the need for a multidimensional approach to assess deprivationThere's been some good news for India over the last month. Three different robust, credible measures of poverty have recorded a dramatic reduction in the incidence of poverty in India. The most straightforward of these, the World Bank's estimate of the number of people living on less than $1.90 per day on a purchasing...