A week after the Planning Commission submitted to India’s top court an affidavit on its assessment of who the poor are, several leading economists have urged the government to delink food entitlements from what they call “faulty” poverty measures. Last week, in an affidavit to the Supreme Court, India’s apex planning body said the spending threshold per capita for the poverty line was Rs.32 per day (per person) in cities and...

Union Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, lacking sportsman’s spirit, has stuck to his post like Dendrite paste, despite a series of failures in combating secessionist insurgencies including the armed offensive led by the Communist Party of India (Maoist). He parrots Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and considers Maoists to be “the most formidable challenge to governance.” “Only if villagers think that the real adversary is the Naxal who keeps them under threat will...

In a significant move, prominent economists on Monday made a forceful plea to delink food entitlements from the “faulty” poverty measures put out by the Planning Commission. Asserting that under-nutrition was much more widespread in the country than income poverty “however defined,” the economists sought restoration of the universal Public Distribution System (PDS) “as the best way forward'' in combating hunger and poverty. “This is not only feasible within the available fiscal...

Objecting to the Planning Commission's poverty estimates and worried about the outcome of a case pending before the Supreme Court, the UPA government on Thursday underlined the need for reworking the BPL (Below the Poverty Line) cap in a bid to do away with any kind of cap, which has become a matter of controversy. Rural development Minister Jairam Ramesh shot off an eight page e-mail letter to the Deputy Chairman...

A report by an expert group on Universal Health Coverage (UHC) has suggested wide-ranging institutional reforms to regulate the public and the private sectors to ensure assured quality and rational pricing of healthcare services. The group, set up by the Planning Commission to develop a blue print and investment plan to meet the human resource requirements to achieve health for all by 2020, focuses on rational use of drugs. The extensive...