-FirstPost.com Travelling across the country for the past five months to bring farmers’ voices to urban audiences through a programme called ‘Smart Agriculture’ - to be broadcast every Saturday and Sunday from 25 July on CNN-IBN - we have learnt that agriculture is not a low-profit activity. In fact, it returns more than double the amount of cash invested. Sandipan Suman, a 47 year-old agricultural sciences graduate and maize grower in Bihar’s...
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Socio Economic Caste Census: Has It Ignored Too Many Poor Households? -NC Saxena
-Economic and Political Weekly A survey to identify who the poor are and how many are actually poor is necessary if programmes and benefits targeted at the needy are to reach them. The Socio Economic Caste Census, of which partial results have been published, was intended to do this. Yet, even a cursory look at the figures indicates that they call for a willing suspension of disbelief. N C Saxena (naresh.saxena@gmail.com) was...
More »35 per cent urban India is BPL, says unreleased data -Shalini Nair
-The Indian Express Urban poor are highest in Manipur, Mizoram, Bihar, least in Goa and Delhi Unreleased data from the first urban Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC), tabulated as per criteria laid down by the erstwhile Planning Commission’s expert Hashim committee, shows that roughly 35 per cent of urban Indian households live below poverty line (BPL). This amounts to 22 million households of the total 63 million households surveyed in 4,041...
More »‘Housing for all’ Shelter scheme to exclude rental plan -Shalini Nair
-The Indian Express As per the earlier proposal, the Centre was to provide for 75 per cent of the construction cost of rental units. As Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveils the ‘Housing for All’ by 2022 on Thursday, rental housing, proposed with an outlay of Rs 6,000 crore, will now be missing from the NDA government’s flagship shelter mission. According to officials, the mission originally had provisions for creation of urban rental...
More »The Importance of Being 'Rurban': Tracking Changes in a Traditional Setting -Dipankar Gupta
-Economic and Political Weekly A categorical distinction is facing rough weather--that between urban and rural. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in not just as external markets but as external inputs. Further, many of our villages barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker in towns is slowly...
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