-The Economic Times The latest consumption figures from the National Sample Survey Organisation show that rural consumption grew 18% in the two years to 2011-12. Poverty fell by roughly 7% in villages and 1% in towns. The town-country gap in incomes narrowed. This is welcome but needs to be qualified. 2009-10 was a drought year, depressing consumption and thereby exaggerating the improvement registered two years later. Over a longer seven-year period, between 2004-05...
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India’s Child Development Index ranking drops-Anhad Hundal
-Down to Earth Is placed along with countries like Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana and the People’s Democratic Republic of Lao While the world has made significant progress in child health, education and nutrition in the past decade, India has fared poorly among middle-income countries. It has been given a ranking of 112 in the Child Development Index (CDI) report released by the non-profit Save the Children. This is much lower than the...
More »Food security is a basic right-Brinda Karat
-The Times of India The present food Bill legalises the injustices of a targeted distribution system A national campaign throughout the month of July on issues related to food security and against rising prices will culminate in a five-day sit-in protest in Delhi beginning today. These are issues fundamental to the well-being of the majority of our people and therefore deserve national support. With the spectre of drought haunting the countryside, speculators, hoarders...
More »Cotton brings doom to tribal farmers-S Harpal Singh
-The Hindu Desperation seems to have caught up with the normally imperturbable tribal farmers of Adilabad which is evident from the abnormally large number of suicides by them since 2011. As many as 27 of them, all cotton farmers including a woman, from the aboriginal Gond, Naikpod, Mannepu and the Lambada plains tribe, figure in the list of 101 cotton farmers who have committed suicide since January 2011. Giving up life, for...
More »A textbook case of exclusion-Rupa Viswanath
To replace ‘Dalit’ with ‘SC’, as the Thorat panel recommends, is to be inaccurate A commission led by S.K. Thorat, and charged with reviewing NCERT political science textbooks in the wake of the cartoon controversy, has singled out a specific word in the text for removal. All instances of the word “Dalit”, it is recommended, should be replaced with “Scheduled Caste” (SC). The blogosphere is rife with speculation on the motivation...
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