-Hindustan Times Almost two and a half years after the 2017-18 Consumption Expenditure Survey (CES) was scrapped, the ‘great Indian poverty debate’ seems to have resurrected itself. The second season of this debate, interestingly, has started from Washington DC, not India. Poverty statistics in India have always been the subject of controversy. The country saw a big debate on the trend in poverty and the veracity of poverty estimates in the 2000s....

-PTI/ NDTV.com The working paper titled 'Pandemic, Poverty, and Inequality: Evidence from India' presents estimates of poverty and consumption inequality in India for each of the years 2004-5 through the pandemic year 2020-21. New Delhi: Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana (PMGKAY), which provides free foodgrains to poor people, played a key role in keeping extreme poverty in India at the lowest level of 0.8 per cent during the pandemic-hit 2020, according to...

-IdeasforIndia.com The Centre has sought an additional Rs. 25,000 crore as funding for MNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act). Based on simple calculations using official data, Ashwini Kulkarni contends that the actual fund requirement is in fact much higher. As the pandemic continues to adversely impact rural livelihoods, the government should allocate sufficient funds to MNREGA, in order to honour the work-on-demand guarantee. For over a month, national and local...

After the release of the second phase data of the National Family Health Survey Fifth Round (NFHS-5), media commentators and experts have written that the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) for India has gone down just below the replacement-level fertility. The TFR for the entire nation was 2.2 in 2015-16, which decreased to 2.0 in 2019-21.   According to the United Nations, the replacement-level fertility is reached when the TFR of a...

-The Hindu The reduction of out-of-pocket expenditure that the NHA highlights is essentially due to a decline in utilisation of care Low public spending on health in India has meant that people depend heavily on their own means to access health care. It causes rich-poor, rural-urban, gender and caste-based divides in access to health care, pushes people to poverty, and forces them to incur debt or sell assets. As a result, our...