The poverty line that the Tendulkar Committee proposes depends on reduced calorie consumption, and fails to provide for reasonable household expenditures on schooling and health.  For some years, the Government of India has been under pressure to change the norms for calculating the official poverty line. Current norms have resulted in gross and manifest underestimation of the numbers of the poor, and, consequently, in the exclusion of hundreds of millions...

The aftershock of the global financial crisis threatens to deprive millions of children in the world’s poorest countries of an education, the 2010 Education for All Global Monitoring Report warns. With 72 million children still out of school, a combination of slower economic growth, rising poverty and budget pressures could erode the gains of the past decade. “While rich countries nurture their economic recovery, many poor countries face the imminent prospect...

Of Indian households’ total annual income, 0.22 per cent is spent on buying newspapers — that is, if total national household annual income was Rs 100, 22 paise would be set aside for newspapers. Paying off bank loans (expenditure under equated monthly instalments) takes up 1.4 per cent of total household annual income. The share of health expenditure is 1.5 per cent, and that of education expenditure, 3.21 per cent....

It used to be a quip in the 1970s that estimation of poverty in India is stymied by the poverty of estimation. The other joke was that far too many economists and statisticians had prospered trying to estimate poverty! So, we have yet another estimate of poverty in India. Rural poverty numbers for 2004-05 are up from the earlier estimate of 28.3 per cent to 41.8 per cent — with...

There is every sign that India is launching into a period of rapid urbanisation. In the next 30 years, an additional 350 million people will have to be accommodated in our existing towns as well as in brand new urban spaces. Given our inability to cater to even the existing urban population, there are serious concerns about our ability to deal with the influx. Are we entering a world of...