The 'Food Security' Bill falls flat as its content does not match its aspirations A disconnect runs through the nomenclature, preamble, objectives and content of the National Food Security Bill, 2011. The Preamble goes beyond the Title and states that the Bill provides “for food and nutritional security in human life cycle approach, by ensuring access to adequate quantity of quality food at affordable price….” Even on cursory reading, it is...

Methodology error, intentionally manipulated data of poor quality and perilous local level political partiality is making the life of poor miserable and proved time and again that ‘any initiative for the poor tends to be a poor initiative.’ The erroneous way of assessing multi-dimensional indicators for locating the poor without making any distinction between facilities self-created by someone against facilities created through government schemes is nothing but an attempt to hide...

Even as the opposition took the government to task for tweaking consumption data to show that the number of poor in India has declined, as first highlighted on Monday by Mint columnist Himanshu, Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia defended the methodology used for the calculation by the plan panel. Ahluwalia said the inclusion of money spent on the mid-day meal scheme in so-called private household expenditure was correct because...

-The Times of India The Centre on Thursday junked the Planning Commission's poverty definition with PM Manmohan Singh saying that there was a need to devise another method. "We need a multi-layered approach to assess poverty estimates. The Tendulkar Committee estimates have been followed for 30 years but not an inclusive estimate. It (Tendulkar report) is not satisfactory," Singh said on the sidelines of the Padma Awards function. A new team will devise...

-The Economic Times Data released by the Planning Commission on Monday showed that poverty had significantly declined between 2004-05 and 2009-10. The catch is that this decline is based on a poverty line that is even lower than the earlier Rs 32-per-day mark that had triggered an outrage when the government submitted it to the Supreme Court.  The new estimates are based on a poverty line that averages Rs 672.8 per month...