Three basic necessities of life — tapped drinking water, electricity connection and sanitation — together are not available to 82% of rural Indian households, a government survey has revealed. The three elements were key in the defining of India's new poverty line earlier this year by the Suresh Tendulkar committee, which said that 46% of rural Indians were poor. The poverty line was based on National Sample Survey Organisation report of...

The recent crisis in the micro-finance industry, brought about by some incidents in Andhra Pradesh, has led to the development of a new concept in the Indian thinking on development — that of “responsible finance”. Responsible finance is supposed to mean financial activities by companies that make just about enough returns to stay in business and charge rates of interest on loans to the poor that are only marginally higher than what...

MICROFINANCE is an example of something that is sadly all too rare: an anti-poverty tool that usually at least breaks even. If you make small, uncollateralised business loans to groups of poor women, they almost always repay them on time. It has grown rapidly in many countries, not least Bangladesh and India. With nearly 30m clients each, these are now the world’s biggest markets for microfinance. Yet the industry has...

The below poverty line (BPL) and Antodaya Anna Yojana (AAY) families in Karantaka get only 20 kg instead of the scheduled 35 kg of food grain every month due to paucity of supply by the Centre, the Supreme Court has been told. Out of about 5.28-crore population in Karnataka, 25 per cent, numbering 1.38 crore people averaging 37 per cent nationally, belong to below poverty line (BPL) and get benefits of...

Rahul Gandhi, the general secretary of India’s Congress party, often says that there exist “two Indias” — one of the rich, and one of the poor. Those two Indias were in evidence a couple of weeks ago, when closely timed events on opposite sides of the planet brought into relief the deep divides that in many ways define this country. In Mumbai on Nov. 7, President Barack Obama told a group of...