-The Hindu Restricting the price subsidy to coarse grains alone will not only work better from both fiscal and equity points of view but also weaken the incentives for graft The National Food Security Act (NFSA), passed recently by Parliament, offers 5 kg per person a month of cereals at highly subsidised prices to more than the bottom two-thirds of the population. It has been rightly hailed as the largest welfare programme...

-The Hindu Sample size 5,000 households with 11,000 interviewees Price rise, not corruption, will be the most important issue for farmers when they go to vote in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, says a Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) random survey. The sample size comprised 5,000 farming households with 11,000 interviewees including 4,298 women and 2,115 youths. Issues of unemployment and lack of irrigation will be other concerns that...

-Economic and Political Weekly   Examining who the beneficiaries are of the Integrated Child Development Services programme, an aspect that has been neglected, this paper presents econometric estimates regarding the relative strength of personal and household circumstances in determining the likelihood of utilising the programme's services. These estimates suggest that inter-group differences in utilisation rates have less to do with characteristics and much more to do with group identity. The paper also...

-Outlook As subsidies for the Poor continue to be under attack, a ground-up report from 10-states shows how well welfare schemes have worked over the last 10 years. Ahead of Elections 2014, rights-based welfare schemes are under attack. To those who argue ‘Dolenomics' doesn't work, a survey of five schemes in 10 states shows that the Rs 1,68,478 crore annually the nation spends is making a real and tangible difference on...

-Down to Earth Bad loans of public sector banks to business are more than double the food subsidy There are some things you simply do not do in the liberalised economy. You do not put bank loans under the lens-unless these are ballooning out of control. That is, until such loans are likely to jeopardise the entire banking system and send the economy into a tailspin. And there's another thing: you don't...