It used to be a quip in the 1970s that estimation of poverty in India is stymied by the poverty of estimation. The other joke was that far too many economists and statisticians had prospered trying to estimate poverty! So, we have yet another estimate of poverty in India. Rural poverty numbers for 2004-05 are up from the earlier estimate of 28.3 per cent to 41.8 per cent — with...

A seminar titled Food Security and Sustainability in India, organized at Amritsar between 7 and 8 November by the GAD Institute of Development Studies, a NGO, at Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, brought together government officials, scientists, academicians and NGOs so as to generate discussions and debates surrounding climate change and global warming and their impact on agriculture. The Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change is going to take place between...

The Nobel laureate Prof. Amartya Sen said on child domestic workers that “it is not economic poverty but rather political poverty that is depriving children their rights to education and pushing them to labour force. Our actions should aim at attacking this political poverty to bring education to the reach of children and free child domestic workers from the bondage.” The child domestic labour is common and traditional form of...

The United Nations on 23 October, 2009 took a step towards helping the billion people around the world suffering from hunger achieve access to adequate food with the publication of a ‘how-to’ guide providing the tools for governments, institutions and civil society to assert this basic human right. The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) has released a comprehensive six-volume set of guidelines, which it calls a “toolbox,” containing hands-on advice...

For some time now, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been the organising framework for the activities of international organisations and donor agencies. It is probably not very useful any more to quarrel about their relative lack of ambition, their limited aims and absence of recognition of the structural causes of poverty and inequality. All that is well known; even so, simply because of their wide acceptance, the MDGs have...