The Planning Commission, headed by the prime minister, has filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court quantifying the daily poverty line for an adult as Rs 26 in rural, and Rs 32 in urban India. At today’s relentlessly increasing prices, Rs 26 will not get a manual worker even one nutritious meal a day — leave alone the 2,400 calories he is required to eat to enable him to work,...

-The Economic Times   The Planning Commission's affidavit to the Supreme Court that anyone with a monthly expenditure of more than Rs 965 in urban areas and Rs 781 in rural areas would be deemed 'not poor' has been greeted with howls of indignation. Rightly so! Though both numbers - adjusted for inflation - are an improvement over the Tendulkar Committee's numbers of Rs 447 a month in rural areas and Rs...

-The Hindu   Cautioning against keeping “high-investment facilities” idle, the former Atomic Energy Commission chief, M. R. Srinivasan, has sought a vigorous public relations push to counter the “misinformation campaign” against the Kudankulam nuclear project. Noting that there is some amount of misunderstanding in the minds of the people protesting against the project after the Fukushima accident in Japan, he said, “Safety is not in anyway compromised.” “The Atomic Energy Department, Nuclear Power Corporation...

Less than two years after splitting coal mining zones into ‘go and no-go’ — a move that has stalled almost every big-ticket coal mining project in India — the government is scrapping the policy. The Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF), which had FRAmed the policy guidelines along with the Ministry of Coal, on Tuesday accepted that the categorisation of ‘go and no-go’ did not have any legal sanctity. The move was...

-The Hindu   The government on Tuesday extended the terms of reference of the Nilekani task force on direct transfer of subsidies to include an Aadhaar-enabled unified payment inFRAstructure. Set up by the Union Finance Ministry under the chairmanship of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) chief Nandan Nilekani in February, the task force was asked to recommend and implement a solution for direct transfer of subsidies on kerosene, LPG and fertiliser to...