-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Eliminating Planning Commission's role in etching the poverty line and instead tasking expert government agencies to determine India's below poverty line population may help depoliticize the exercise, a former top NSSO official has said. Former director-general of National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) Jogeshwar Dash feels the Planning Commission's mandate of framing policy clashes with estimating poverty ratios that are an outcome of strategies the panel devises. "Poverty...

-The Hindu Per capita entitlements under the food security bill will not cover beneficiaries as comprehensively as household entitlements The government hopes to secure in this session of Parliament, approval for the National Food Security Bill (NFSB) so that it can replace the food security ordinance. The NFSB, on which the ordinance is based, guarantees supplementary nutrition services through anganwadis for all children under six, midday meals for schoolchildren, and, very importantly, maternity...

-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...

Ashish Bose coined the term BIMARU in a paper to then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s to highlight the economic backwardness of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. He tells Somesh Jha he is not inspired by the Planning Commission’s bogus poverty figures. He says it is time the commission wound up. Excerpts:   * You coined the term 'BIMARU', but these states performed well in alleviating poverty in...

-The Hindustan Times India's official poverty line-a vital economic statistic-is threatening to snowball into a major political controversy in an election year. Political parties are busy quibbling over the details of defining a poverty line amid a welter of protests from social activists who are accusing it of abdicating its responsibility. Economists set a poverty line to fix a threshold income to get a headcount of poor people in a country. Households...