-The Hindu Why the inactivated polio vaccine is essential for India With wild polio virus strains reduced by 99.9% since 1988, the world is inching towards eradicating polio. But unfortunately, more children today are affected by the live, weakened virus contained in the oral polio vaccine (OPV) that is meant to protect them. The weakened virus in the vaccine can circulate in the environment, occasionally turn neurovirulent and cause vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV)...

-The Telegraph World Bank report suggests that 33% of the Jan Dhan accounts were opened by people who already had bank accounts New Delhi: The Congress on Thursday said the Jan Dhan accounts, one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship programmes, were “an exercise in mass deception”, aimed at creating propaganda tools for “self-praise” rather than the avowed objective of financial inclusion of the poor. “By December 2016, twenty-four per cent of the...

-The Hindu A national policy for internal migration is needed to improve earnings and enable an exit from poverty Though migration is expected to enhance consumption and lift families out of absolute poverty at the origin, it is not free from distress — distress due to unemployment or underemployment in agriculture, natural calamities, and input/output market imperfections. Internal migration can be driven by push and/or pull factors. In India, over the recent...

-Factchecker.in Mumbai: In 254 religious identity-based hate crimes reported in India between January 1, 2009, and October 29, 2018, at least 91 persons were killed and 579 were injured, according to a new FactChecker.in database, released on October 30, 2018. About 90% (229) of these attacks were reported after May 2014, when the current Bharatiya Janata Party-led government assumed power nationally. The Citizen’s Religious Hate-Crime Watch (Hate Crime Watch, in short) records...

For long, economists have argued among themselves whether income should be the only criterion for measuring poverty. After all, in real life a person can face multiple deprivations, say, in terms of access to education, health and living standards, among others. The multidimensional poverty index (MPI), which offers a valuable complement to traditional income-based poverty measures, was first introduced in the 2010 Human Development Report (HDR). The MPI looks at...