-Livemint.com/ Bloomberg To join the global middle class, India must do much better Max Roser is at it again. The Oxford professor and master of economic data visualization has a new set of maps and charts showing how global income and inequality have changed during the last couple of centuries. The upshot is that while the world has gotten steadily richer that entire time, something very special and very good has...

-The Hindu Business Line Government surveys on out-of-school children are gross underestimations. The Census numbers, however, are a shocker Census 2011 showed that about 32 million children aged between 6 and 13 years have never attended any educational institution, even though government estimates of out-of-school children show substantially lower numbers. Given that out-of-school numbers consist of both children who dropped out and those who never attended school, it raises some questions over...

-The Hindu Forty years after being established with a mandate to generate data on the nutritional status of socially vulnerable groups, the National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau (NNMB) has been shut down by the Union Health Ministry. The bureau, under the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), had been critical in informing the government’s poverty alleviation interventions with periodic assessments of nutrient deficiency among tribal communities, pregnant women, adolescents and “at-risk” elderly population...

-The Hindu Business Line Earlier this month, the World Bank decided to raise its global poverty line from $1.25 per day (in Purchasing Power Parity or PPP terms) to $1.90. A monumental change in global poverty took place earlier this month, but don’t be surprised if the world doesn’t look very different to you. Earlier this month, the World Bank decided to raise its global poverty line from $1.25 per day (in Purchasing...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: At a time when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is on a visit to India, the government's contract with his company is under intense legal scrutiny. For the first time, following court instructions, the Centre has filed in the Delhi high court a copy of the contract with Facebook that allows the latter to operate in the country. In an affidavit, the Centre has annexed the contract...