In April, India’s Planning Commission accepted recommendations put forth by the so-called Tendulkar Committee on a new poverty headcount for the country. Constituted by the Planning Commission under economist Suresh D Tendulkar, the committee, after four years and a new methodology, arrived at a new figure for the number of Indians living below the poverty line: 37.2 percent, ten points higher than the previous official figure. With the government’s subsequent...

Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto, who is the the capital to meet with government officials will over the next few days, seek to formalize an arrangement to help the government integrate its vast inFormal Economy with the mainstream. De Soto is the founder of the think-tank the Institute for Liberty and Democracy and is best known for his role in eradicating the Shining Path guerilla movement by empowering landless peasants who...

The day Kumari Selja assumed charge as the Union minister for housing and urban poverty alleviation in the second United Progressive Alliance government, she got an unusual gift: a set of two books from none other than Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The books, The Other Path and The Mystery of Capital, were by eminent Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, hailed as the “poor man’s capitalist”for his work on the informal sector....

Can more knowledge about our society, about the individuals and groups who constitute it, be a bad thing? I’ve been wondering about this lately, in the context of two government initiatives to gather more knowledge about us Indians, as caste groups and as individuals. Both of these information-gathering exercises—the proposal for a “caste census”, which has generated a stormy argument, and the merely desultory discussion over the planned Unique Identification...

Built into the economic dogma of growth first is the ingrained notion held by large segments of the nation's elite that the fabric of inequality is meant to remain unimpaired.  “The Challenge of Employment in India; An InFormal Economy Perspective” sums up the findings of a National Commission set up in September 2004 to review the status of the unorganised/ínformal sector in India (Volume I Main Report and volume II...