In recent years, the ‘official’ India has been patting itself on account of accelerated economic growth rates and the presumed progress in poverty reduction. However, as this paper argues, the recent economic growth has been extremely lopsided; more than ever before. Further, large sections of the country’s population continue to suffer, very acutely, with reference to a whole range of development deficits. This paper is an attempt to sketch a snapshot of India’s economic growth performance, along with some of the major development deficits it is facing.

Negating the impact of the current inflationary episode in India on the poor requires both the ensuring of appropriate supplies through imports, and a transfer of purchasing power from the profit earners to the workers. Hence, even if augmentation of supplies through resorting to imports, as the government is doing now in the case of foodgrains, succeeds in ending inflation, there is still the need to put additional purchasing power in the hands of the poor so that they regain their earlier real income. The author argues that the basic problem with the 2007-08 budget is that it is oblivious of these social demands of a situation of profit inflation.

The enormous increase in the proportion and number of self-employed workers in India in recent years is still not adequately analysed. This paper looks at the conditions of self-employment in terms of perceptions of remuneration and work intensity. It is shown that the rising trend of self-employment reflects the precarious conditions of labour markets in India, where paid employment is simply not increasing fast enough to meet the needs of the growing labour force.

The tremendous economic pressure that the Indian countryside has come under in the recent years is bound to impact the well-being of the masses in the rural economy. This paper is an attempt to examine the key elements of the contemporary agrarian crisis and its possible consequences for agricultural labourers. It appears that their economic conditions, in any case quite fragile and vulnerable even in 'better' times, have taken quite a battering in the recent years.

This paper explores why the official poverty estimates show low levels as well as decline in poverty in India over the 1990s, whereas all other economic and social indicators suggest that absolute poverty is high. The former do not capture the true picture because the official method involves the 'fallacy of equivocation'. It is also argued that when actual rural poverty is as high as nearly four-fifths of the population and poverty depth is increasing with a higher proportion of people being pushed down into lower nutritional status, there is an urgent need to revert to a demand-driven universal public distribution system.

It has been evident for some time now that concerns about food security are not relics of the past, but unfortunately only too contemporary in India. The preliminary and partial results of the latest National Family Health Surveys should certainly cause alarm bells on the state of public nutrition to ring very loudly in the corridors of power.

The Planning Commission has just released its Approach to the Eleventh Five-Year Plan, which is entitled ''Towards faster and more inclusive growth''. It is argued in this paper that the macroeconomic presumptions of the approach are faulty and unlikely to generate anything resembling more inclusive growth.

While the Millenium Development Goals adopted by the UN in 2000 are a set of worthy objectives, the free-market-obsessed deregulation policies that were suggested for reaching the MDGS have faced little scrutiny. There has also been relatively little assessments on the ground or presentation of the perceptions of the people who are supposed to be benefited by it. In this regard, a new Actionaid report provides an eye opener.

In Bangladesh, the reduction in poverty has not been commensurate with the expectations generated by the macroeconomic pattern of relatively stable and non-inflationary growth witnessed over the past decades. It is apparent that one crucial link to ensure more rapid poverty reduction, the generation of productive employment, has simply not been operating in a way that would show more effective results.

This is the complete Final Report of 'the Commission on Farmers' Welfare' which was set up at the end of September 2004 by the Government of Andhra Pradesh, India, to look into the agricultural crisis in the state, manifest most glaringly in farmers' suicides. It was the opinion of the commission that the agrarian crisis in Andhra Pradesh can be linked to a combination of wrong public polices of liberalisation and globalisation policies at the central and state government levels and failures at the level of local implementation. It made recommendations for corrective policies in six different areas related to agriculture.

The Unfulfilled Potential of the ICDS

The Integrated Child Development Scheme, or ICDS, will be 30 years old this year. It has achieved some successes, yet the problems which it was meant to address remain substantial. In this paper, C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh assess the impact of the ICDS and consider how it can be made more effective.

As budget day approaches, there are clear signs of a widening divide between those who helped put the UPA government in power and those who currently run it. If the Manmohan Singh government seeks to push through during the budget session all that it is promising domestic and international capital, it may force the Left to withdraw support.

Land reforms are typically thought of only in terms of land redistribution, which is seen as politically too difficult to attempt. But there are a range of other measures which are very important in ensuring not only better equity in agriculture but also greater viability of farming and improved agricultural productivity. C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh discuss some of these issues and possibilities, taking rural Andhra Pradesh as the specific example.

Oil Prices: Encashing an External Shock

Despair and Determination in Anantapur

Addressing the issue of agrarian distress in Andhra Pradesh's Anantapur district is a hugely challenging task. It is necessary to consider the issues of sustainability and continued viability of farming and also the related question of developing non-agricultural income opportunities.

The extensive nature of the agrarian crisis in Andhra Pradesh is now widely known. But it is not more generally recognised that what has already happened in that state is actually replicating itself to varying degrees across rural India. In this article, C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh investigate some of the problems affecting Andhra agriculture, and the wider background in which they have occurred.

Muslim Women in India