My Blog

Author: haroonkhan

  • Introduction

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    haroonkhan
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    Human Society has a much longer history than the social sciences devoted to its study. Efforts are continually being made to reconstruct our past by pre-historians, archaeologists and scholars of ancient history. In doing so, they have searched for whatever credible evidence they could gather, mostly in the form of artefacts and elements of material…

  • Situating Change in Sociological Theory

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    haroonkhan
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    The demography of society is constantly changing with the birth, growth and death of its members. It also changes due to migration—members leaving the society (emigration) or outsiders arriving and settling down (immigration) temporarily or permanently; migration changes the ratio of insiders and outsiders. The outsiders contribute to a society’s multicultural character. Changes also occur…

  • BPL Measures by Government of India

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    haroonkhan
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    For our purposes, it will suffice to mention the measures adopted by the Planning Commission in recent years to identify the families Below the Poverty Line. We refer to the measures employed while drafting the Tenth Plan (2002–07). In its Tenth Five-Year Plan (2002–07) survey, BPL for rural areas was based on the degree of…

  • The Poor Identified in Antyodaya

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    haroonkhan
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    In 1977, the Government of Rajasthan initiated a programme named Antyodaya, meaning the rise of the last. This name was borrowed from one of the Gandhian strategies for the amelioration of poverty. The modality adopted for its operation was, however, very different. Antyodaya focused on individual poor families, particularly the poorest of the poor. For their identification, the Programme…

  • Dandekar-Rath Method of Poverty Line

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    haroonkhan
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    In their study of Poverty in India, V. M. Dandekar and Nilkanth Rath used the concept of poverty line. They constructed the poverty line based on the income required for a person to purchase a given calorie norm of food per day. At the 1960–61 price levels, these authors fixed poverty line at  15 for rural areas and  22.50…

  • PPP Estimates of GNP Per Capita

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    haroonkhan
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    It is calculated by converting GNP to US dollars on the basis of purchasing power parity rather than the exchange rate. The calculation is made by converting one unit of the currency (the US dollar, in this case) into the number of units of national currency required to buy some defined goods and services in…

  • Headcount Index

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    haroonkhan
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    It is the percentage of people who are below the poverty line. This Index does not measure the depth of poverty, however. When the sum of all poverty gaps is multiplied by the headcount index, the Poverty Gap Index is obtained.

  • Poverty Gap

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    haroonkhan
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    This is used to measure the distance between the poverty line and the mean income of the poor. The formula used for this purpose is:   where y stands for the subsistence minimum, x for the income of the i-th observed household and N for the total number of households observed.

  • Engel Coefficient

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    haroonkhan
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    It is the ratio of expenditure on food to the lump sum of general expenses of a family. In 1992, the Russian government set the limit at 68 per cent for households, and 83 per cent for pensioners. Households or pensioners spending more than this sum on food were treated as poor. Using this yardstick, the…

  • Decile Coefficient

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    haroonkhan
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    It compares the average per capita income of the lowest 10 per cent with the average per capita income of the highest 10 per cent of the population. The greater the difference between them, the greater the gap between the rich and the poor. Similar comparisons are also made for the lowest 20 per cent…