Now that it’s Millennium Development Goal (MDG) week, expect a host of studies/ articles/ commentaries around how India has failed to meet the important MDGs, on how parts of India are worse than sub-Saharan Africa or Bangladesh when it comes to nutrition, and so on. The UN set the ball rolling when it said that “with just five years to the 2015 deadline for achieving the MDGs, the country as a...

It’s been often asked why our officialdom, with all the intellectual capital at its command, is unable to quantify the number of the really poor in India. Is this such a difficult thing to do? It is all the more baffling because in recent times, the debate on India’s poverty has only further confounded ordinary citizens. The Planning Commission had come up with an assumed deprivation ratio of 27.5 per...

Among the various definitions of "noise" is this one: "Something that draws public notice". And "Making Noise" is precisely what groups all over India are doing, or Planning to do, in the days ahead in order to wake up the government to its promises. In the year 2000, India was among the countries that had signed on to achieve, by 2015, the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These goals...

The list of cabinet ministers unhappy with the Planning Commission's view on various policy matters seems to be growing longer. The latest to join it is Housing and Poverty Alleviation Minister, Kumari Selja, who has taken a dispute between her ministry and the Planning Commission over redefining India's urban poverty estimate to UPA president Sonia Gandhi. Sources said Selja wrote to Gandhi in August last week. "The minister has sent a...

Food inflation will defy government policies to remain in high single-digit levels in the long run, unless there is a change in an overwhelming bias among farmers towards staples such as wheat and rice, say economists and policymakers. A steady growth in population and rapidly rising income levels are adding to inflationary pressure at a time when agricultural productivity is showing a decline. A major reason is that the agriculture...