Can more knowledge about our society, about the individuals and groups who constitute it, be a bad thing? I’ve been wondering about this lately, in the context of two government initiatives to gather more knowledge about us Indians, as caste groups and as individuals. Both of these information-gathering exercises—the proposal for a “caste census”, which has generated a stormy argument, and the merely desultory discussion over the planned Unique Identification...

‘Beggar type.’ Like most of us, Smita Jacob had never come across that pithy official phrase before. It’s a classification in the records of the police of New Delhi, India’s richest city, used to describe a dead homeless person whose death is too insignificant to investigate. The police are as sensitive as you and I to the cripple on the pavement, the child at the car window. They mean no...

Flaws In The PDS… Poor verification norms, over two crore bogus BPL cards Over 1.2 crore BPL families don’t have a ration card No monitoring, resulting in pilferage, gaps in delivery, poor quality foodgrains Poor profit margins a major cause for corruption Lack of information hinders benefits from reaching the poor …and the Solutions Base fair price shops on new business model The Centre takes ‘responsibility’ for delivery in states Make verification...

The economist and political commentator who was appointed to a four-member team of the UN to recommend reforms to the global financial system critiques Budget 2010 Economist and political commentator Prabhat Patnaik, currently vice-chair of the Kerala Planning Board, is a strong critic of the government’s economic policies. In 2008, Patnaik, who has taught at JNU since the 1970s, was appointed to a four-member team of the UN to recommend...

The Union government’s decision to revive a long-forgotten concept of primary producers’ companies (PPCs) ought to be welcomed. Such companies can help small farmers and individual craftsmen come together to derive economies of scale. The idea of farmers’ companies which extend the benefit of being a registered firm while allowing farmers to derive all the benefits of agricultural land ownership, was mooted nearly a decade ago. After much debate, the...