A unified, efficient market platform integrated with major mandis of the country, coupled with the onboarding of service providers and stakeholders of the agricultural commodity value chain, has the potential to boost farmers’ income by ensuring better crop prices through a transparent price discovery and quality certification. Such a platform can equally benefit the service providers, traders and others.
“Under the system of Chaturvarnya, the Shudra is not only placed at the bottom of the gradation but he is subjected to innumerable ignominies and disabilities so as to prevent him from rising above the condition fixed for him by law. Indeed until the fifth Varna of the Untouchables came into being, the Shudras were in the eyes of the Hindus the lowest of the low. This shows the nature of what might be called the problem of the Shudras. If people have no idea of the magnitude of the problem it is because they have not cared to know what the population of the Shudras is. Unfortunately, the census does not show their population separately. But there is no doubt that excluding the Untouchables the Shudras form about 75 to 80 per cent of the population of Hindus.”
Thus writes Dr B.R. Ambedkar in his seminal work, Who Were the Shudras: How They Came to be the Fourth Varna in the Indo-Aryan Society (1946), where he situates the degraded socio-cultural position of the Shudras (almost all the individual caste groups known as Other Backward Classes (OBC) in constitutional parlance today as well as some others belong to this historical-social category mentioned in both historical and literary texts).
In 2011, the Human Development Report introduced the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) in order to align poverty alleviation with the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals. The pioneering work in constructing the index was of Sabina Alkire and James Foster (2008).
. An Immersive Online Discussion Workshop on the Carrying Capacity of the Himalayas: A People-Centric Approach was organized by the Centre for Environment, Climate Change and Sustainable Development (CECCSD), IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute, New Delhi on October 9th, 2023. This discussion was part of the #WebPolicyTalks Series: The State of the Environment - #Planet Talks.
The chair for the program was Mr. Tikender Singh Panwar, a Senior Fellow at IMPRI and the Former Deputy Mayor of Shimla.
This article examines the urgency of affordable housing in India and analyses key initiatives like the Credit Linked Subsidy Scheme and SWAMIH Fund.
Small enterprises need a rating agency to rate big companies that treat them like dirt. And that rating impact the big company's reputation, credit-rating score and ESG rating. The rating agency should also rate GoI and state governments for revealed, as opposed to claimed, ease of doing business, depending on how fairly government departments and state-owned enterprises transact with small companies.
The multidimensional poverty report released by the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog) suffers from gaps and opens the door for suspicion when we consider several data of the preceding years, including the pandemic years.