India celebrates one year without polio cases, huge milestone in fight against disease, Associated Press, January 12, 2012, Washington Post: “India will celebrate a full year since its last reported case of polio on Friday, a major victory in a global eradication effort that seemed stalled just a few years ago. If no previously undisclosed cases of the crippling disease are discovered, India will no longer be considered polio endemic, leaving only Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria on that list. ‘This is a game changer in a huge way,’ said Bruce Aylward, head of the World Health Organization’s global polio campaign. The achievement gives a major morale boost to health advocates and donors who had begun to lose hope of ever defeating the stubborn disease that the world had promised to eradicate by 2000. It also helps India, which bills itself as one of the world’s emerging powers, shed the embarrassing link to a disease associated with poverty and chaos, one that had been conquered long ago by most of the globe…”

Scanning 2.4 billion eyes, India tries to connect poor to growth, By Lydia Polgreen, September 1, 2011, New York Times: “Ankaji Bhai Gangar, a 49-year-old subsistence farmer, stood in line in this remote village until, for the first time in his life, he squinted into the soft glow of a computer screen. His name, year of birth and address were recorded. A worker guided Mr. Gangar’s rough fingers to the glowing green surface of a scanner to record his fingerprints. He peered into an iris scanner shaped like binoculars that captured the unique patterns of his eyes. With that, Mr. Gangar would be assigned a 12-digit number, the first official proof that he exists. He can use the number, along with a thumbprint, to identify himself anywhere in the country. It will allow him to gain access to welfare benefits, open a bank account or get a cellphone far from his home village, something that is still impossible for many people in India…”

India’s stingy definition of poverty _ $12.75 a month for city dwellers _ called little help, Associated Press, May 27, 2011, Washington Post: “Every day, through scorching summers and chilly winters, Himmat pedals his bicycle rickshaw through New Delhi’s crowded streets, earning barely enough to feed his family. But to India’s government he is not poor - not even close. The 5,000 rupees ($110) he earns a month pays for a tiny room with a single light bulb and no running water for his family of four. After buying just enough food to keep his family from starving, there is nothing left for medicine, new clothes for his children or savings. Still, Himmat is way above India’s poverty line. Earlier this month, India’s Planning Commission, which helps sets economic policy, told the Supreme Court that the poverty line for the nation’s cities was 578 rupees ($12.75) per person a month - or 2,312 rupees ($51.38) for Himmat’s family of four. For rural India, it’s even lower at about 450 rupees ($9.93)…”

• BPL poverty cap placed at 46%, By K. Balchand, May 19, 2011, The Hindu: “The Below the Poverty Line (BPL) census, approved by the Union Cabinet on Thursday, will be an exercise in identifying households that will fit the bill within the poverty cap of 46 per cent of the rural population of India. The identification of the 46 per cent poverty cap, estimated by the Planning Commission, will be done through a set of automatic exclusion and automatic inclusion criteria, and the remaining households will be classified through seven assigned deprivation indicators. At the same time, State-wise caps based on the S.D. Tendulkar methodology have been allowed for better targeting of those living below the poverty line. The 46 per cent cap is lower than the 50 per cent suggested by the N.C. Saxena Committee. Officials have remained silent on the displeasure of the Supreme Court on placing a cap on the BPL list…”
• India ‘redefines’ poverty for new survey, May 19, 2011, BBC News: “India’s cabinet has approved a proposal for a survey to identify people living below the poverty line, which also redefines what constitutes poverty. It will classify the rural poor into ‘destitutes, manual scavengers and primitive tribal groups’. Urban poor will be defined as those in vulnerable shelters, low-paid jobs and homes headed by women or children. The survey, to be conducted alongside a caste census later this year, will help identify those who need state aid. There are various estimates on the exact number of poor in India…”

• Microfinance struggles to restore its reputation, By Erika Kinetz (AP), March 7, 2011, Boston Globe: “Long heralded as a way to lift the downtrodden out of poverty, microfinance is under a cloud. The stories of lives being changed by a $27 microloan and picture perfect scenes of smiling women with colorful handlooms, empowered by affordable credit, have been replaced by headlines about borrowers driven to suicide. At best, microfinance seems to be failing to achieve its most noble goal: poverty alleviation. At worst, some lenders are contributing to a cycle of indebtedness and abuse, just like the loan sharks they sought to replace. Critics say the industry has grown too quickly for its own good, with too much rapaciousness and too little regulation. That has fostered a breakdown in lending discipline, with multiple loans to overextended borrowers, and allowed some unscrupulous players to thrive…”
• India’s poor need help to help themselves, By Sarika Bansal, March 7, 2011, The Guardian: “Until recently, microfinance has been the golden child of international development. Microfinance companies would lend small amounts of money to poor women who would, in the ideal scenario, use them to start small businesses. Their interest rates were typically lower than loan sharks’ but still high enough to make a profit. Around the world, development experts believed microfinance was an ideal way to alleviate poverty, a smart way to ‘do good’ while also ‘doing well’. How times have changed. In the last few months, many people have become newly critical. In November, politicians in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh started making bold claims about how microfinance’s crushing interest rates and strongman tactics were, among other things, leading to suicide among over-indebted borrowers…”

Indian state empowers poor to fight corruption, By Lydia Polgreen, December 2, 2010, New York Times: “The village bureaucrat shifted from foot to foot, hands clasped behind his back, beads of sweat forming on his balding head. The eyes of hundreds of wiry village laborers, clad in dusty lungis, were fixed upon him. A group of auditors, themselves villagers, read their findings. A signature had been forged for the delivery of soil to rehabilitate farmland. The soil had never arrived, and about $4,000 was missing. The bureaucrat, a low-level field assistant who uses the single name Sreekanth, was suspected of stealing it. ‘I am a very rightful person,’ he declared. But the presiding official would have none of it. He ordered that the money be recovered and that Mr. Sreekanth be promptly disciplined. That simple verdict was part of a sweeping experiment in grass-roots democracy in rural India aimed at ensuring that the benefits of government programs for the poor actually go to the poor. It empowers villagers to act as watchdogs and to perform ’social audits’ like the one that meted out quick justice to Mr. Sreekanth. Their success or failure could have broad implications for India’s quest to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty…”

In India, greed creeps into microlending, critics say, By Rama Lakshmi, October 30, 2010, Washington Post: “The microcredit revolution has been celebrated for helping poor women in developing countries start small businesses. By borrowing money for purchases such as a buffalo or sewing machine, the women were able to help lift their families out of poverty. But critics say the microcredit model has been perverted by commercial greed in India, with reports of abusive collection methods and sky-high interest rates…”

Nokia taking a rural road to growth, By Kevin O’Brien, November 1, 2010, New York Times: “On Saturday at dawn, hundreds of farmers near Jhansi, an agricultural center in central India, received a succinct but potent text message on their cellphones: the current average wholesale price for 100 kilograms of tomatoes was 600 rupees. In a country where just 7 percent of the population have access to the Internet, such real-time market data is so valuable that the farmers are willing to pay $1.35 a month for the information. What is unusual about the service is the company selling it: Nokia, the Finnish cellphone leader, which unlike its rivals - Samsung, LG, Apple, Research In Motion and Sony Ericsson - is leveraging its size to focus on some of the world’s poorest consumers. Since 2009, 6.3 million people have signed up to pay Nokia for commodity data in India, China and Indonesia. On Tuesday, Nokia plans to announce it is expanding the program, called Life Tools, part of its Ovi mobile services business, to Nigeria…”

Sun co-founder uses capitalism to help poor, By Vika Bajaj, October 5, 2010, New York Times: “Vinod Khosla, the billionaire venture capitalist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, was already among the world’s richest men when he invested a few years ago in SKS Microfinance, a lender to poor women in India. But the roaring success of SKS’s recent initial public stock offering in Mumbai has made him richer by about $117 million - money he says he plans to plow back into other ventures that aim to fight poverty while also trying to turn a profit. And he says he wants to challenge other rich Indians to do more to help their country’s poor…”

India asks, should food be a right for the poor?, By Jim Yardley, August 8, 2010, New York Times: “Inside the drab district hospital, where dogs patter down the corridors, sniffing for food, Ratan Bhuria’s children are curled together in the malnutrition ward, hovering at the edge of starvation. His daughter, Nani, is 4 and weighs 20 pounds. His son, Jogdiya, is 2 and weighs only eight. Landless and illiterate, drowned by debt, Mr. Bhuria and his ailing children have staggered into the hospital ward after falling through India’s social safety net. They should receive subsidized government food and cooking fuel. They do not. The older children should be enrolled in school and receiving a free daily lunch. They are not. And they are hardly alone: India’s eight poorest states have more people in poverty - an estimated 421 million - than Africa’s 26 poorest nations, one study recently reported. For the governing Indian National Congress Party, which has staked its political fortunes on appealing to the poor, this persistent inability to make government work for people like Mr. Bhuria has set off an ideological debate over a question that once would have been unthinkable in India: Should the country begin to unshackle the poor from the inefficient, decades-old government food distribution system and try something radical, like simply giving out food coupons, or cash?..”

• New poverty index finds Indian states worse than Africa, July 13, 2010, Hindustan Times: “More people are mired in poverty in eight Indian states than in the 26 poorest African countries, according to a new UN-backed measure of poverty. The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) looks beyond income at a wider range of household-level deprivation, including services, which could then be used to help target development resources. Its findings throw up stark istics compared to regular poverty measures. The study found that half of the world’s MPI poor people live in South Asia, and just over a quarter in Africa. There are 421 million MPI poor people in eight Indian states alone — Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal — and 410 million in the 26 poorest African countries combined. The researchers said that the extent of poverty in India had often been overlooked, by figures comparing percentages of poor people in countries as a whole rather than sheer numbers…”
• ‘Acute poverty in eight Indian states’, July 12, 2010, The Hindu: “Acute poverty prevails in eight Indian states, including Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, together accounting for more poor people than in the 26 poorest African nations combined, a new ‘multidimensional’ measure of global poverty has said. The new measure, called the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), was developed and applied by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative with UNDP support. It will be featured in the forthcoming 20th anniversary edition of the UNDP Human Development Report. An analysis by MPI creators reveals that there are more ‘MPI poor’ people in eight Indian states (421 million in Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal) than in the 26 poorest African countries combined (410 million). The new poverty measure gives a multidimensional picture of people living in poverty, and is expected to help target development resources more effectively, its creators said…”

Right-to-know law gives India’s poor a lever, By Lydia Polgreen, June 28, 2010, New York Times: “Chanchala Devi always wanted a house. Not a mud-and-stick hut, like her current home in this desolate village in the mineral-rich, corruption-corroded state of Jharkhand, but a proper brick-and-mortar house. When she heard that a government program for the poor would give her about $700 to build that house, she applied immediately. As an impoverished day laborer from a downtrodden caste, she was an ideal candidate for the grant. Yet she waited four years, watching as wealthier neighbors got grants and built sturdy houses, while she and her three children slept beneath a leaky roof of tree branches and crumbling clay tiles. Two months ago she took advantage of India’s powerful and wildly popular Right to Information law. With help from a local activist, she filed a request at a local government office to find out who had gotten the grants while she waited, and why. Within days a local bureaucrat had good news: Her grant had been approved, and she would soon get her check…”

Cellphones a tool in India’s fight against corruption, By Rick Westhead, May 24, 2010, Toronto Star: “In many remote corners of the developing world, cellphones have become a valuable tool to battle poverty. Farmers use them to get timely weather forecasts and tips about fertilizers. And when their fields are harvested, they rely on contacts in nearby markets to send SMS messages that help them decide where to take their produce for the best prices, cutting out greedy middlemen. Now, government officials in the central Indian state of Bihar hope the cellphone can tackle a new challenge: battling government corruption. In early 2009, officials with Bihar’s ministry of health told an international development agency of their concern that frontline health-care workers might bolt their jobs. Bihar has 72,000 accredited social health activists - volunteers who are paid commissions for ensuring children are born in hospitals and properly vaccinated. But the activists typically aren’t paid for months and, even then, only get a portion of their earnings because local managers demand kickbacks of as much as 40 per cent in exchange for their paycheques…”

India, despite poor health care, sees drop in maternal mortality, By Mian Ridge, May 11, 2010, Christian Science Monitor: “It is rare good news for poor women in India. A new report has found a significant drop in the rate at which women across the world die as a result of childbirth - with one of the most dramatic falls in India. Maternal deaths in India decreased from 677 per 100,000 live births in 1980 to 254 in 2008, according to a study published in the Lancet, a leading British medical journal, in April. This contributed to a global fall of 35 percent to 251 per 100,000 live births, found a research team led by Christopher Murray at the University of Washington…”

• New figure for poor: 372m, By Chetan Chauhan, April 18, 2010, Hindustan Times: “As many as 372 million Indians will be categorised as poor in the proposed National Food Security Act, the Planning Commission said on Saturday. It would mean that additional 97 million people would get subsidised food grains, once the proposed law is implemented, increasing the government’s food subsidy bill by around Rs 20,000 crore, to Rs 75,000 crore. The proposed law guarantees 25 kg of food grains only to below poverty line families. As of now, 275 million poor Indians get up to 35 kg in subsidised food grains from the government-run fair price shops…”
• 37.2 per cent of population BPL, 10 crore families to get food security, By P Vaidyanathan Iyer, April 18, 2010, Indian Express: “For purposes of food security, the Planning Commission today finally accepted that the number of people living below the poverty line in India is 37.2 per cent of the total population. The Plan panel, mandated by the empowered group of ministers chaired by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee to finalise the BPL numbers, will now meet the secretaries of food and expenditure on Tuesday to calculate the cost of providing food security to so many poor. The 37.2 per cent poverty line (that works out to 40.71 crore for 2004-05) is based on the methodology recommended by the Suresh Tendulkar committee that submitted its report to Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia in December 2009. The report is yet to be officially accepted by the Plan panel…”

• India set to measure poverty beyond food, By S.P.S. Pannu, December 11, 2009, India Today: “India is likely to switch to a new method of estimating poverty, which includes total expenditure required by families on clothes, housing, health, education and conveyance apart from adequate food, which was until now the sole criterion for determining poverty. Planning Commission member Abhjit Sen said this gives a more realistic picture of the poverty level as the earlier estimates were based only on the food calorie intake of a person. Sen said the new method uses the lifestyle of the urban households as a benchmark for the rural families as well since they also need to spend on health, education, clothes, transport and housing. Estimates, for the year 2003- 04, using the new method show that a whopping 41.8 per cent of the country’s rural population live below the poverty line based on the wider criteria…”
• 37.2% of India is in poverty by criterion of consumption, By P. Vaidyanathan Iyer and Priyadarshi Siddhanta, December 9, 2009, Express India: “The poverty ratio or the number of poor as a percentage of total population in India for 2004-05 is estimated at 37.2 per cent, according to a new report submitted on Tuesday by the Suresh Tendulkar committee to Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia. The committee, headed by Tendulkar, former chairman of the PM’s Economic Advisory Council, was asked to review the methodology to measure poverty. The committee has defined the poor based on a normative living standard - it has moved away from calorie intake as the criterion and considered per capita consumption expenditure on commodities and services. The number of poor in India in 2004-05 based on an estimate by the Planning Commission released in March 2007 is 30.17 crore or 27.5 per cent of the population. It will, however, be wrong to compare the Tendulkar committee’s estimate with the Plan panel’s 2007 numbers since the criteria for defining the poverty line itself have changed…”

Amid droughts and failed crops, a cycle of poverty worsens, By Mark Magnier, December 1, 2009, Los Angeles Times: “She stops for long stretches, lost in thought, trying to make sense of how she’s been left half a person. Sunita, 18, who requested that her family name not be used to preserve her chance of getting married, said her nightmare started in early 2007 after her father took a loan for her sister’s wedding. The local moneylender charged 60% annual interest. When the family was unable to make the exorbitant interest payments, she said, the moneylender forced himself on her, not once or twice but repeatedly over many months. ‘I used to cry a lot and became a living corpse,’ she said. Sunita’s allegations, which the moneylender denies, cast a harsh light on widespread abuses in rural India, where a highly bureaucratic banking system, corruption and widespread illiteracy allow unethical people with extra income to exploit poor villagers, activists say…”

Poverty line fluctuates with conflicting data, By Priyadarshi Siddhanta, August 20, 2009, Indian Express: “The issue of poverty estimation seems to be getting more complicated as a government-sponsored panel has now said that about 38 per cent Indians are poor - 10 percentage points higher than a previous estimate. The states are already opposed to the Centre’s calculations on poverty estimation. In an interim finding, former chief of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council Suresh Tendulkar has estimated that 38 per cent of India’s population (comprising 8.32 crore families) is poor…”

Report highlights hunger in India, July 31, 2009, BBC News: “India is emerging as the world centre of hunger and malnutrition, a report by Indian campaign group, the Navdanya Trust, says. The trust says that there are more than 200 million people - or one-in-four Indians - going without enough to eat. The prominent environmentalist Vandana Shiva, who runs the trust, said there were now more hungry people in India than in sub-Saharan Africa…”