Articles by Srijit Mishra

Marginal and small farm sizes constitute more than 85% of the operational holdings in India. Several concerns regarding the sustainability, efficiency, access to formal sources of credit and the scale neutrality of such credit plague the smallholders. This study finds that the smallholders are efficient but the returns to them are woefully low, which threatens their sustainability. Further, the smallholders have to rely more on non-institutional sources for their credit requirement and often with a greater interest burden. In addition, the credit provided by formal sources is not scale-neutral. This posits a difficulty for policy praxis, which must urgently address these issues plaguing the smallholders.

The proposed Rangarajan method on measurement of poverty in India borrows elements from three earlier methods - those of Alagh, Lakdawala and Tendulkar. An important departure in the Rangarajan method is to compute the poverty line commodity basket by combining items from two fractile groups to address the relatively higher expenses for some essential non-food items. This, while being statistically plausible, poses a behavioural dilemma, as there will be no fractile group that will satisfy both. As an alternative, we suggest dual poverty lines where the fi rst is computed on the basis of average calorie, protein and fat requirements which are region- and state-specifi c and the second uses the combined median fractile group after adjusting the distribution with price differentials.

States of India, 1975-2001 A Statistical Note SRIJIT MISHRA Suicide data in India is compiled through police records. This is available in an annual publication Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India, National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), ministry of home affairs, New Delhi. A time series data for suicides across states by sex was compiled from this data for the period 1975 to 2001.1 To make comparison possible, the number of suicides has to be normalised with the population for the age group 5+ years, as suicide is medically not defined for the age group 0-4 years. Using population data for census years, the inter-censal population has been interpolated and adjusted for sub-group consistency. For instance, 1971 and 1981 Censuses were used to interpolate from 1972 to 1980 and similarly for 1981-1991 and 1991-2001. This has been done in the following manner.

This paper uses NFHS-2 (1998-99) data to explore certain linkages between literacy status of a couple (husband and wife) with outcomes like household standard of living index (SLI) and others having implications on women and child health. An attempt has also been made to link the proximate criterion in literacy in the couple domain with outcome variables such as SLI, instances of sickness among women from specific diseases as asthma, TB, malaria and jaundice; linkages with indicators like under-nutrition in women have also been analysed. The exercise affirms the advantage of proximate illiteracy over the secluded illiterate in terms of outcome measures of women and child health as well as household SLI. On the other hand, while patterns are not distinct in terms of a comparison between proximate female illiterate and proximate male literate, indications point to the latter doing comparatively better.

on any stratum. One gets an impres- West and Central India HDR West and Central India Human Development Report; National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER); Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2002; pp xxii+418, Rs 495.