The government is collaborating with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to ensure that India’s flagship welfare programme leads to a tangible improvement in the Human Development Index among the scheme’s beneficiaries. UNDP and the Union government have launched a pilot project aimed at making the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) more efficient and effective by coordinating it with other development programmes. “The idea is to leverage this massive...
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Global youth unemployment rate at all-time high, UN labour agency reports
The global youth unemployment rate is at a record high and is expected to climb even higher as the year progresses, the United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO) announced today. According to a new report, of the world’s 620 million economically active youth between the ages of 15 and 24, 81 million were out of work at the end of 2009, the highest number ever. The youth unemployment rate climbed from 11.9...
More »Half of India’s population lives below the poverty line by Arun Kumar
According to a new Oxford University study, 55 percent of India’s population of 1.1 billion, or 645 million people, are living in poverty. Using a newly-developed index, the study found that about one-third of the world’s poor live in India. The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) has been developed by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) as a more precise and comprehensive means of...
More »Jharkhand, Bihar development like starving Congo, Kerala similar to Philippines by Rukmini Shrinivasan
It isn't too much of a stretch to say that India is made up of many nations. A comparison of state-level and country-level data from the newly released multi-dimensional poverty index shows that while Kerala and Goa are at a similar level of development as 'middle-income countries' like Indonesia, Jharkhand and Bihar are similar to 'least-developed countries' like the Democratic Republic of Congo. Earlier this month, the new MPI measure...
More »Revisiting Indian poverty by CP Chandrasekhar
Even as India once more self-declares its “arrival on the world stage” with a symbol for the Indian rupee, a global assessment presents a depressing picture of India’s actual economic performance. In a study whose conclusions were to be expected, the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHDI) has revealed that an appropriate index of poverty (and deprivation) finds its incidence in India and elsewhere to be much greater than...
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