-Economic and Political Weekly   Budget 2012, built yet again at the altar of fiscal fuNDAmentalism, will not convince anybody. In this era of immediate assessment it took just a few minutes for the Union Budget for 2012-13 to be given one or the other negative appellation &NDAsh; “lacklustre”, “anti-growth”, “back to the 1980s”, “without reform” and the like. Such evaluations forget that union budgets have long since ceased to be statements of...

Inequality in India is worsening and clearly following the US pattern India is a “relatively low-income inequality country” &NDAsh; to borrow an expression from a World Bank publication &NDAsh; when compared to China or Brazil, but there is no doubt that disparities have been widening of late. Planning Commission officials have admitted that inequality has risen in the first decade of the new millennium, although the factors responsible for it need...

The idea of interlinking rivers is appealing because it is so grand, but this is also the reason it is nothing more than a distraction The Supreme Court recently issued a diktat to the central government about the scheme to interlink rivers. The directions are straightforward. The government shall set up a high-level committee of ministers and other representatives on interlinking of rivers; the committee shall meet “at least once in...

But will it reflect true level of poverty in the country? India's poverty line has hit the headlines again. In the past six months this is for the second time that the government has tried to bring out a poverty line. Like the poverty line in September last year, the new poverty line has also triggered widespread dissent and debate. In an action replay, this time also the government almost junked...

If you could spend more than Rs 28 per day and lived in a town, or Rs 22 per day and lived in a village, you were above the poverty line. This is Planning Commission's new poverty line for the year 2009-2010. According to its most recent estimates, 52 million people moved out of poverty between 2005 and 2010. For rural areas, poverty is down from 42% to 33% while for...