-The Indian Express Socio-Economic and Caste Census can help identify welfare beneficiaries without falling into a binary trap. The release earlier this month of the Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) has been followed by much media analysis. Some have expressed scepticism about what it shows and others have treated it as yet another set of numbers on how many are poor in India. It has also been variously hailed as revolutionising benefit...
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The UN Report on Out-of-School Kids is Bad News for India. The Real Picture May Be Worse -Kiran Bhatty
-TheWire.in The newly released UNESCO e-atlas on out-of-school children (OOSC) provides worrying evidence not only of the low priority being accorded to basic education across developing countries, but also by the developed world in terms of the aid given to education. As many as 124 million children and adolescents worldwide are out of school, 17.7 million – or 14 per cent – of whom are Indian. The rise in the number...
More »Mystery surrounds India health survey -Justin Rowlatt
-BBC Good health data is rare in India. The last time the country published a comprehensive, state-wide survey was back in 2007. So why hasn't a vast survey of women and children carried out by the Indian government with the UN agency for children, Unicef, been released? India's so-called Rapid Survey of Children was a huge undertaking. Almost 100,000 children were measured and weighed and more than 200,000 people interviewed across the country's...
More »The digging-holes myth -Jean Dreze
-The Indian Express The view of MGNREGA as a makeshift work programme is far off the mark. Few social programmes in India are more resented by the corporate sector than the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). This is easy to understand, considering that one of the primary aims of the MGNREGA is to empower workers and reduce their dependence on private employers. Naturally, employers see this as a threat...
More »Think tank report hints at diversion of cheap farm loans -Puja Mehra
-The Hindu Huge subsidy of 5 percentage points being leveraged. Pointing to a possible diversion of subsidised funds meant for farmers to non-agricultural uses, a research paper by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) has found that the crop loans extended in India are in fact close to exceeding the total expenditure on farm sector inputs. In 2012-13, the aggregate short-term credit — provided primarily to finance the purchase...
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