Poor returns to cultivation and absence of non-farm opportunities are indicative of the larger socio-economic malaise in rural India. This is accentuated by the multiple risks that the farmer faces yield, price, input, technology and credit among others. The increasing incidence of farmers...

Indian agriculture today is under a large crisis. An average farmer households returns from cultivation would be around one thousand rupees per month. The incomes are inadequate and the farmer is not in a position to address the multitude of risks : weather, credit, market and technology among...

The popularly known Human Development Index (HDI) is obtained through linear averaging (LA) of indices in three dimensions - health, education and standard of living. LA method assumes perfect substitutability among the indices. We question its appropriateness and propose an alternative measure,...

Maharashtra is among the richest states in India in terms of per capita income, yet incidence of poverty in the state remains close to the national average. The states economy grew at a faster rate than the all-India average during 1980-1 to 1992-3, but it slowed down a bit during 1993-4 to...

We impose a value judgment that a decrease in failure should be accompanied by a decrease in gap (difference or ratio) between sub-groups. In other words, the same gap at lower levels of failure is to be considered worse off. This, in line with transfer sensitivity axiom of poverty indices, is...

Using Minkowski distance function we propose a class of Human Development Index measures. Special cases of this turn out to be the popularly used linear average method as also a newly proposed displaced ideal method. Two measures of penalty are suggested. One captures the non-uniform attainment...

The conventional measure of Human Development Index (HDI) is a linear average across dimensions, HDI1. Under this, poor attainments in any dimension gets perfectly compensated for better attainments in any other dimension HDI2, which is based on Euclidean distance measuring shortfall from the...

The relatively lower reduction of poverty in Orissa, 0.2 percentage points per annum from 48.6% in 1993-94 to 46.4% in 2004-05, has been a matter of concern. The current exercise attempts to analyse whether part of the explanation lies in the state of affairs in agriculture. An analysis for...

Using Bayesian updating to deterministic priors persistence of fundamentalist belief like those in the mind of a terrorist is explained. Under such belief system if conditional evidence is diametrically opposite and also deterministic then a process of change will set in and in the present war...

In a recent paper, Mishra and Subramanian (2006) propose a measure to explain group-differential which is sensitive to levels in the sense that a given hiatus at lower levels of failure (or higher levels of attainment) is considered worse off. This paper critically evaluates their method -...