A week after the Planning Commission submitted to India’s top court an affidavit on its assessment of who the poor are, several leading economists have urged the government to delink food entitlements from what they call “faulty” poverty measures. Last week, in an affidavit to the Supreme Court, India’s apex planning body said the spending threshold per capita for the poverty line was Rs.32 per day (per person) in cities and...
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Jairam asks Montek to revisit BPL cap by K Balchand
Objecting to the Planning Commission's poverty estimates and worried about the outcome of a case pending before the Supreme Court, the UPA government on Thursday underlined the need for reworking the BPL (Below the Poverty Line) cap in a bid to do away with any kind of cap, which has become a matter of controversy. Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh shot off an eight page e-mail letter to the Deputy Chairman...
More »‘Rs. 39 enough for med expenditure’ by Dhananjay Mahapatra & Nitin Sethi
Updating the poverty line cutoff figures, the Planning Commission said that those spending in excess of Rs 32 a day in urban areas or Rs 26 a day in villages would no longer be eligible to draw benefits for those living below the poverty line. TOI broke down the overall monthly figure for urban areas and used the CPI for industrial workers along with the Tendulkar committie report figures to see...
More »It just works in TN by Alamu R
A combination of political commitment, awareness and better transparency has ensured that the PDS in Tamil Nadu works as intended, ensuring Food Security for all. Believe it or not, the Public Distribution System (PDS) is working quite successfully in Tamil Nadu — this is one of the main lessons we have learnt from a recent survey of the PDS in Dindigul and Dharmapuri districts. Be it political commitment that lies behind...
More »Place progress reports on PDS schemes: HC to govt
-The Times of India The Gujarat high court (HC) on Thursday asked the state government to specify what steps it has taken to implement the schemes that are introduced to make the public distribution system (PDS) effective. This status report is in connection with an order passed last year. In 2010, the HC had asked the state government to implement various schemes like Antyodaya Anna Yojana, Targeted Public Distribution System, Annapurna Scheme,...
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