The government on Tuesday contested the WHO figures that put the number of Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB) cases in India at 63,000, saying there were only 10,267. As many as 38,287 suspected cases were examined till the end of 2011 and of them, 10,267 have been diagnosed with MDR-TB and 6,994 put on treatment, according to TB India-2012 — the annual status report of the Revised National TB Control Programme...

The Budget provides proof of the United Progressive Alliance government having forgotten the importance of its own “flagship schemes”. BUDGET 2012-13 provides conclusive proof that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government has lost its way. It has managed the remarkable feat of upsetting almost everyone and making no one happy. The Budget is highly regressive in both taxation and spending terms and will raise prices of essentials, so aam aurat and...

-IANS Debunking the government's claim that the number of poor  in India has come down, a top adviser has claimed that around 70 % of the country's 1.2 billion population is poor, and stressed the need for a multi-dimensional assessment of poverty.  "The government claim that poverty has come down is not valid... there is a need for a multi-dimensional assessment of poverty as around 70% of the population is poor," National Advisory...

Remember when the public was outraged at the idea that the poverty line should be 32 rupees, or 63 cents, a day in urban areas? We’ve now learned it should really be 29 rupees. And believe it or not, this is no sleight of hand to show a drop in poverty. The Planning Commission’s latest poverty estimates, released Monday evening, show a 7 percentage-point drop in India’s poor, the largest fall since...

-Economic and Political Weekly   Budget 2012, built yet again at the altar of fiscal fundamentalism, will not convince anybody. In this era of immediate assessment it took just a few minutes for the Union Budget for 2012-13 to be given one or the other negative appellation – “lacklustre”, “anti-growth”, “back to the 1980s”, “without reform” and the like. Such evaluations forget that union budgets have long since ceased to be statements of...