This year's Nobel Prize in economics (the Riksbank Prize to be more precise) has been awarded to three US-based economists for their research into what promotes or hinders the growth of wealth among nations.

Several international organisations are now engaged in the business of measuring what they call "poverty". The World Bank has been in it for some time, but now we have a new measure of "Multidimensional Poverty" brought out by the UNDP and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI).

Poverty is taken to be a homogeneous phenomenon irrespective of the mode of production that is under consideration. Even reputed economists believe in this homogeneous conception of poverty.

The other day the Chief Executive Officer of Niti Ayog made a fantastic claim, that the poverty ratio in India had fallen below 5 percent according to the 2022-23 consumption expenditure survey data.

Even though the latest consumption survey is not comparable with earlier surveys, and the full data have not yet been released, some preliminary results point to significant inequality in consumption.

Neo-Liberalism propagates a set of outright falsehoods to present itself in a favourable light compared to the preceding dirigiste regime in India. The basic theme is to suggest that under neo-liberalism there has been such an acceleration of the growth rate of Gross Domestic Product that the people as a whole have become much better off.

One of the striking findings of the Bihar Caste Survey, which bears out what the Left has been asserting for a long time, is that absolute poverty in the country is far more pervasive than what successive governments in India have been claiming.

Regulating financial activity in global commodities markets, while important, is not enough to stave off rising food insecurity. Policymakers must also take measures to help developing countries build up reserves of essential items and cope with price fluctuations, possibly through a publicly administered virtual reserve mechanism.

Despite recording chronic and rising trade deficits, India's balance of payments looks stable and resilient. But that stability may prove to be the source of new problems.

To address the debt crisis in the LMICs and prevent its recurrence, it is necessary to address the failure of the international order to provide space for poor countries to earn the foreign exchange needed to service external debt.

On April 3 this year, the minister of state for planning, Rao Inderjeet Singh, said in the Rajya Sabha that the government had no data after 2011-12 for estimating poverty, and therefore had no idea how many people had been lifted out of poverty since then.

The Karnataka government's plan to launch its "Anna Bhagya" scheme on July 1 under which it was planning to provide 10 kg of free rice per month to each family below the poverty-line has run into problems because of the Food Corporation of India's unwillingness to sell any rice to that state.

Self-employed workers in India—more than half the workforce—have suffered especially badly in the last few years. The official labour force survey data reveal that, even after overall economic activity has supposedly "recovered", their real incomes are generally lower than they were just before the Covid-19 pandemic.

There is a commonly-held view that while capitalism in its early stages brings about unemployment and hence an accentuation of poverty, this initial damage is subsequently reversed as it keeps growing.

Real wages of casual workers were already declining before the Covid-19 pandemic, and fell sharply during the pandemic. While they have recovered thereafter, quarterly average wages in April-June 2022 were only slightly above the pre-pandemic peak.

The Global Hunger Index (GHI) for 2022 has just come out, which shows India occupying the 107th position among the 121 countries for which the index is prepared (countries where hunger is not a noteworthy problem are left out of the index).

The "decline in poverty" myth, propagated by the World Bank across the developing world is based on a ridiculously low International Price Line, which does not meet either "basic needs" or nutritional benchmarks, says Prabhat Patnaik. Poverty decline is a highly localized phenomenon in China and east Asia, while countries like India continue to be riddled by high levels of poverty.

The Prime Minister, in his speech, had made several claims about his relief programmes in the past three months. But various recent estimates and field-based reports clearly suggest the huge gap that exists between these claims and the reality of implementation.

The actual fresh allocation by the Centre in its second relief package is shockingly minimal. Showing liquidity provisions as spending for the pandemic and changing labour laws under the guise of self-reliance only reveal its callousness in a time of crisis.

Food and livelihood support must be provided to those who have been forced to bear the burden of the Covid-19 lockdown - and the Centre can easily afford it. Excuses based on public finances will not wash.

With no mechanisms in place to deal with the problem of migrant labourers and delivery issues, Modi government has almost made sure that even its paltry ration scheme does not reach the neediest.

As the pandemic unfolds, the Indian economy is falling off a cliff. There is an immediate need for massive public spending beyond conventional fiscal standards. There is also a need for a global plan for significant debt reduction, massive increase in global liquidity, more aid and moratoriums to survive this crisis.

Since the building of a democratic society requires keeping wealth inequalities in check, the need for substantial inheritance taxes cannot be denied even by bourgeois theory. Lack of any such provision only signifies the bad faith of our governments.

The government's decision to hold back results of the official consumer expenditure survey is another move on its part to suppress information indicative of poor economic performance under its watch.

Leaked data showing a drop in per capita consumer expenditure confirms the massive downturn in the Indian economy. The suppression of such valuable survey data on unjustified grounds of "poor data quality" shows the governments' megalomania.

The 2016 Report of the Haque Committee has proposed liberalization of tenancy market on grounds of efficient land utilization in favour of small landowners. But leasing is seldom done by small to big farmers and owning even a small piece of land provides economic security to the rural poor. Such provisions will only facilitate grabbing of land of the poor by resource-rich landlords and capitalist farmers.

"Global Hunger Index 2019 unambiguously concludes that India ranks lowest among all South Asian countries and that there has been an alarming increase in child "wasting". The government's callous approach to this has its roots in the institutionalized inequality of the Indian caste system."

Prabhat Patnaik explains that the transfer schemes being mooted by the congress and the BJP are indicative of the crisis of neoliberal capitalism, with evidence that whatever the level of growth under the regime, the poor are unlikely to benefit. But neoliberalism also prevents the mobilisation of resources to finance such schemes, deepening the crisis.

As the current government withholds the official employment data, Prabhat Patnaik uses per capita cereal availability to show that poverty and unemployment are likely to have worsened in the Modi years.

At first sight it appears to be an enigma. India has been recording according to official statistics one of the highest GDP growth rates among all the countries of the world, so much so that epithets like "emerging economic superpower" and "a global powerhouse of growth", have been freely used to describe India's achievement.

In a period of upsurge of fascism, narrow nationalism and parochialism, Issa Shivji calls for the social responsibility of intellectuals to construct a counter-hegemonic project that would resonate with the lives of the vast majority.

The conclusion drawn by Piketty and Chancel in their recent paper shows a greater income inequality in India than it has ever been in the past century. But what stands out is that the trend perfectly synchronizes with transition to neo-liberalism, a stage of capitalism wherein international finance has gained hegemony, and no longer remains a policy choice.

Indias' reliance on fortuitous and volatile stimuli to drive growth has resulted in inadequate job creation and widened inequalities while failing to address social deprivation.

Fresh research from UNICEF shows that the number of children in poverty, in rich countries has increased as a result of austerity policies. An average of one in five children in 41 high income countries lives in poverty. Children and their rights do not even seem to feature in the G20 manifesto, even as it stresses the ending of austerity policies and encouraging public budgets that promote development and poverty eradication.

The idea of "Universal Basic Income", today treated as novel, in fact dates back to Kautilya's Arthashastra and Thomas Mores' Utopia in the 16th century. Milton Friedman's "negative income tax" also revolved around the same idea, which was rightfully criticized by Minsky for inducing inflationary expansion in place of direct welfare schemes. Considering distributional effects, direct job creation is a more effective way to tackle poverty.

There is much academic debate on the appropriate estimates of poverty line. Poverty lines are benchmarks for policy makers to measure progress over time. The use of such measures for targeting social assistance is arbitrary. The Planning Commission's use of narrowly defined poverty line estimates restricts access of the poor to basic entitlements such as food and health. What is required is universal provisioning of these entitlements without recourse to any targeting.

An examination of the most recent health outcome indicators across the major Indian states throws up some surprising results. In this article, the authors consider the evidence on infant mortality and maternal mortality rates and show how the various states are ranked quite differently as compared to when GDP growth rate is taken as the primary indicator of progress.

The fact that the bulk of the world's population continues to struggle for subsistence is because of the incubus of an exploitative social order; but this is often obscured by analyses that continue to cling to the illusion that the logic of compound interest will overcome the ''economic problem of mankind''.

The official position idealising economic growth as a national goal and vilifying any opposition to it as anti-national, is reification. But, equally importantly, it is dangerous, both because it criminalizes ideological dissent and because it implicitly justifies corporate control over the State.

Data from the 64th Round of the National Sample Survey, which was specifically concerned with migration and employment conditions, allow for an examination of trends in real wages and the impact of the MNREGS on wages and unemployment. In this article, the authors consider the evidence of these effects on the work conditions of rural casual labour, especially women workers.

Recent inflation in India is special both because of its peaks and its persistence. It is argued that unlike during 2008-09, recent inflation is due to structural problems. Further, a distributional analysis reveals that its impact is not shared equally. People in the lower income groups have been facing uncommon difficulties, as their purchasing power seems to have been halved over the last four years.

The NSSO 64th Round Survey, which was conducted in 2007-08, was concerned specifically with migration. This article examines the broad trends indicated by that survey. It is seen that there are some important changes in the pattern of movement for work, especially with the significant decline in rural male migration rates.

The latest initiative of the Government of India, the UID project, apparently appears to have many advantages for ordinary citizens, especially the poor. But there is a fundamental mistake in presuming that this will do away with corruption and leakages, because it misses out the fact that it is the power relations that enable and assist the pattern of corruption in India. Also the project can lead to an invasion of basic privacy and undesirable monitoring by the state.

It is increasingly being realised that poverty is much more than a lack of adequate income, and therefore there have been efforts to develop broader concepts of poverty that recognise its multidimensional nature and allow for interventions that address different dimensions of poverty.