Rural people have driven India's record decline of 7.4 percentage points in the number of poor since economic reforms were initiated in the early 1990s. The latest poverty estimates by the Planning Commission show that 29.8% or 360 million Indians were poor in 2009-10 as compared to 37.2% or 400 million in 2004-05 — the difference being equal to the population of countries such as Spain, Argentina and Canada. The plan...
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Liberal politics of Economic Survey 2011-12 by Richard Mahapatra
The Economic Survey 2011-12 showcases the dividends of economic liberalisation started by the ruling party. But admits: growth is not possible without agriculture During the last financial year there were talks of the Indian economy finally decoupling from agriculture thus monsoon. The Economic Survey of 2011-12 disagrees with that. The survey has re-emphasised that whatever economic growth happened in the last fiscal it was due to agricultural growth. India recorded the...
More »Why this will be a reform budget-Surjit S Bhalla
Most of us don’t even get a single shot at making history — Manmohan Singh has a second chance The fiscal deficit is an outcome, not a policy. It is the net resolution of the policies pertaining to taxes and expenditure. It is worth analysing separately the two components of the deficit. The table reports the results of relating the tax and expenditure share of GDP to per capita income for...
More »U.N. Human Rights Council Exhorted to Defend Peasants’ Rights by Isolda Agazzi
Decades after peasants’ networks have advocated for a new legal instrument to protect the rights of small farmers to land, seeds, traditional agricultural knowledge and freedom to determine the prices of their production, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) may decide to start drafting a declaration on peasants’ rights next week. "The idea of an international declaration on peasants' rights comes from our (base) because many small farmers don’t have...
More »Why rape victims aren't getting justice by Praveen Swami
In 1953, the authors of India's first-ever crime survey presented a grim picture of the state of the new country's police forces. “There has been,” authors of Crime in Indiareported, “no improvement in the methods of investigation or in the application of science to this work. No facilities exist in any of the rural police stations and even in most of the urban police stations for scientific investigation.” From the National Crime...
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