-The Hindu Business Line Opening bank accounts in rural areas is all very well, but biometric frauds are a serious possibility The ambitious Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) aims at bringing millions of rural Indians within the financial mainstream by opening bank accounts. In 2006, the Reserve of India, recognising that a majority of rural Indians had little or no access to banking services, allowed banks to use third-party, non-bank agents...
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More men among toilet-sceptics in India -Rukmini S
-The Hindu The figure for households without toilets is 47 per cent for Hindu households as against 31 per cent for Muslims and 16 per cent for Christians and Sikhs, according to NSS data. Extensive new evidence shows that building toilets alone will not eliminate open defecation in India as not everyone who has access to toilet, especially men, believe that it's important to use it. Not having a toilet remains the major...
More »Open Defecation: Evidence from a New Survey in Rural North India -Diane Coffey, Aashish Gupta, Payal Hathi, Nidhi Khurana, Nikhil Srivastav, Sangita Vyas, and Dean Spears
-Economic and Political Weekly Despite economic growth, government latrine construction, and increasing recognition among policymakers that open defecation constitutes a health and human capital crisis, it remains stubbornly widespread in rural India. We present evidence from new survey data collected in Bihar, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. Many survey respondents' behaviour reveals a preference for open defecation: over 40% of households with a working latrine have at least one...
More »Getting India’s agri support maths wrong -Tejinder Narang
-The Financial Express The USDA projection of 29% of agri GDP is faulty as it counts rural development expenditure also, it is only 13% In a report titled "India's Agricultural Exports Climbs To Record High" (click here to access), the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) speaks of a steep ascent in Indian agro exports-from $5 billion in 2003 to $39 billion in 2013. This may be flattering, but the facts and figures...
More »The children the PM couldn’t speak to -Kiran Bhatty
-The Indian Express More than four years after the RTE was passed, the state has no handle on the numbers of out-of-school children. The recently released report of the Global Initiative on Out-of-School Children, based on a situational analysis of India, opens a Pandora's box on data and methodological issues that plague the estimation of out-of-school children in India. As the report reveals, there is a multiplicity of definitions, sources of data...
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