Housing

With there being almost no housing policies for lower income migrant workers in the country, Kerala has attempted to address this problem by introducing a state-level housing policy called Apna Ghar. This article examines the policy’s effectiveness by exploring the “housing–work” relation in the existing housing sub-markets in Kerala’s Ernakulam district, in which the residential typologies inhabited by such worker groups are examined as to their economic affordability, service/amenities adequacy, workplace accessibility and ease of renting/shifting habitations.

A study on the socio-economic and educational status of denotified tribes reveals that members of these tribes are plagued by chronic poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, health complications, and substandard living conditions, apart from the label of ex-criminals. They face an identity crisis in the absence of statutory documents and therefore, need special policies for their welfare and upliftment.

Amid the chaos around the new gross domestic product figures put out by the Central Statistics Office, profound improvements made in another prominent statistical marker--the Consumer Price Index--also compiled by the CSO, went unnoticed. The CPI series was revised to a more recent base year, 2012. This alone probably deserves commendation as base years of other national price indices have grown significantly remote. It is indeed a tectonic shift in estimation procedure and conforms to international best practice concerning CPI. Here we discuss the decision of CSO to replace the arithmetic mean with the geometric mean in the updated CPI indices by going through each of the established approaches to index number theory used to identify the appropriate formulation to calculate basic indices.