-Down to Earth Our policy makers should move away from the income criterion for estimating poverty and take cognisance of other indicators Amid mounting criticism and heated debates about the poverty line, a challenge has resurfaced to examine whether there could be a single non-monetary criterion of estimating poverty. A poverty line is a monetary cut-off point below which a person is deemed to be poor. Thus, any attempt to measure poverty...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Undeterred by the tumult surrounding the food security bill and the fear of opposition parties stalling it in Parliament, Congress president Sonia Gandhi is ready to launch the Flagship Food Security Programme at a mega public function in Talkatora Stadium on Tuesday. The Delhi government views this is an opportunity to kick off its poll campaign centred on the aam admi. The launch, which coincides with...

-The Hindu Overcoming son preference in India remains a daunting challenge as even educated women are prone to it Have women fared better than men, and girls better than boys in the last decade or so? In the din over a dramatic reduction in poverty in the period 2009/10-2011/12 that is unlikely to die down, deep questions about the discrimination and deprivation that women face from the womb to the rest of...

-The Hindu Among the 18 States which stand to lose are Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Delhi, Uttarakhand and some north-eastern States. Even as the National Food Security Bill is pending in Parliament, the Centre has conveyed to certain States that their foodgrain allocation would decline in spite of the mandatory 75 per cent rural and 50 per cent urban populations being covered under the proposed new law. Among the 18 States which...

-The Hindu The story today is a far cry from the 1960s, when we led the developing countries' fight against the disease Tuberculosis is very much in the news, but for all the wrong reasons - a shortage of drugs; increasing multi-drug and extensive drug resistance (MDR, XDR), making treatment both cumbersome and expensive; total drug resistance (TDR) as a veritable death warrant; popularly used serological tests for diagnosis being declared worse...