Feature Article

Despite their green intentions, buyers of blended biofuel may not be getting quite what they are paying for.

A controversial nuclear club is taking shape.

If a link with cancer wasn't bad enough, radiation may be bad for your heart too.

Dinosaurs might have known a surprising amount about what we think of as a quintessentially modern problem: global warming.

Many governments have implemented conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes with the goal of improving options for poor families through interventions in health, nutrition, and education. Families enrolled in CCT programmes receive cash in exchange for complying with certain conditions: preventive health requirements and nutrition supplementation, education, and monitoring designed to improve health outcomes and promote positive behaviour change. The aim was to disaggregate the effects of cash transfer from those of other programme components.

India's states have employed several land reform measures, including reforming tenancy, imposing land ceilings, distributing government wasteland, and allocating house sites and homestead plots. With relatively modest revisions, some of the existing laws and policies can further their original intent of increasing the poor's access to rural land and providing for secure land tenure. But old land reform approaches, such as blind adherence to land ceilings and tenancy reform, need reconsideration.

In the past, research on land distribution in rural India has pointed out that the surveys by the National Sample Survey Organisation have yielded underestimates of the extent of land inequality and landlessness. In a fresh analysis, this paper, using household level data from the 48th and 59th rounds (1992 and 2003-04) of the NSSO, finds that (within the limitations of the data) more than 40 per cent of households in rural India do not own land, as much as 15 million acres is in ownership holdings of more than 20 acres, and inequality in ownership has worsened between 1992 and 2003-04.

The national economy is growing at near double-digit rates but neither industry nor non-agricultural activities in rural India have been able to provide livelihoods for millions of rural workers. It is this failure that underlies the spurt in rural violence that has highlighted once again the issue of the poor's access to land, water and forests. It is gradually being recognised that further deterioration of economic, social and political conditions of the rural poor can neither be arrested nor reversed without a significant policy shift towards a comprehensive land reform programme.

One of the criticisms of the official poverty line is that it does not capture the cost of basic necessities, particularly non-food components such as health and education. This issue gains importance due to an increase in household private expenditure on education and health services in recent years. This article estimates poverty ratios at the all India level and for the states in 2004-05 by including the minimum private expenditure on health and education. The estimated poverty ratios are substantially higher than the official poverty ratios.

There is fresh trouble in the Doha round with an attempt to broker a deal at all costs