In The Media ⁽⁴⁰⁰⁾

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(Abstract or Full-text unavailable)

Even the popular narrative, which paints the ST as the victims of development, is thoroughly falsified by the evidence.Read full article Evidence that poverty has declined since India began to liberalise in the 1980s, that the acceleration in growth to 8-9% range since the mid-2000s has resulted in accelerated poverty reduction and that these trends hold for each broad social group rather than just the aggregate population is as irrefutable as it gets in social sciences. In the accompanying graphic, taken from a recent study by Megha Mukim and the author, show the proportion of the population below the conventional poverty lines in rural and urban areas, respectively, in 1983, 1987-88, 1993-94 and 2004-05 among the scheduled castes (SC), scheduled tribes (ST) and non-scheduled (NS) castes. The years selected in these figures are those associated with large-scale expenditure surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO). The NSSO conducts these surveys only approximately once every five years.

Read full article Abstract: By the sheer loudness of their protests, NGOs, journalists and intellectuals have bamboozled the prime minister into withdrawing the latest Planning Commission report. The report had shown accelerated poverty reduction, a perfectly plausible outcome in view of accelerated growth since 2003-04. But the critics are not happy that India is succeeding in combating destitution. They therefore tirelessly invent myths to muddy the discourse. If we are to avoid costly policy mistakes, we must expose these myths for what they are. The first myth is that the Planning Commission plays fast and loose with poverty lines. This myth, endlessly repeated in the media, is an insult to the country’s finest tradition of letting professionalism rule without any political interference whatsoever in setting the poverty lines. According to Professor T N Srinivasan, arguably the world’s top living expert on poverty, the history of poverty lines in India goes as far back as 1876. That year, Dadabhai Naoroji provided the first set of poverty lines for various regions of India in a paper entitled ‘Poverty of India’.

Rahul and Sonia Gandhi should lend the Prime Minister a hand in moving the reforms forward just as Prime Minister Narasimha Rao had once done.Read full article So much has already been written on the UP elections that one might ask what more is there to say. Yet, the subject is so fascinating that it is hard to resist. Outcomes in state level elections have lately come to depend critically, though surely not exclusively, on the performance of the incumbent government. As Jagdish Bhagwati and I had originally hypothesised in 2004, the post-1991 reforms had demonstrated that rapid improvement in the economic fortunes was possible and had consequently unleashed a revolution of rising expectations. According to this hypothesis, embraced by numerous commentators recently, voters reward performing governments and punish nonperforming ones. Because individuals think of the state government as having the greatest impact on their lives, this effect operates with potency at the level of the state.