SIVA KUMAR

In migration and mobility studies, the availability of scientifically reliable data remains a persistent challenge. The recent move towards harnessing mobile and big data has also been unable to resolve the data issues due to accessibility, privacy, as well as ethical and methodological intricacies involved with such data sets. In this paper, we explore a new set of data known as visitor location register (VLR) and roaming data, which is recorded and reported by mobile service providers. The reporting model of VLR data used and presented in this paper is not only free from privacy and ethical concerns but also methodologically sound and simple to compute as compared to any previous approaches. Drawing on VLR data, this paper finds direct evidence of unusually high interstate net reverse migration during the first and second COVID-19 lockdowns in India (44.13 and 26.3 million, respectively), and thereafter quick return migration back to cities during unlocks. The findings from this paper also provide insights into evolving migration directions, precarity, pockets of origin and destination and state policies in containing reverse migration during lockdowns in India. We anticipate that the data presented in the paper have the potential to fill a major data gap in migration

India, as a country is a fast developing country where the facilities are being created as world class. It is believed that the developments in India are at higher rates compared to world economies. There are reasons to celebrate when India opened the “world class” airport at Delhi and when Indian athletes emerged second in the commonwealth games. But there are also starker realities of another India when a United Nations backed study by Oxford University revealed that the poverty in Indian states was worse than in some of the poorest countries of sub-Saharan Africa. The Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative has developed a new international measure of poverty – the Multidimensional Poverty Index or MPI. It is claimed that the new innovative index goes beyond a traditional focus on income to reflect the multiple deprivations that a poor person faces with respect to education, health, and living standard. This paper analyses on the important aspects of MPI in relation with Human Development Index and its relevance and application in Indian context with reference to south Indian states.
Multidimensional Poverty Index or MPI is an index of acute multidimensional poverty. It reflects deprivations in human development and takes into consider the range of social factors not so far considered when measuring poverty. Addressing poverty deprivation is the foremost challenge in achieving Millennium Development Goals. The 2001 UN Roadmap towards the Implementation of the MDGs stresses this aspect and points out that all the issues around poverty are interconnected and demands cross cutting solutions. MDGs are the platform for human development priorities and most goals are measured in the space of human capabilities and a holistic understanding is required in assessing the achievement of MDGs. The Human Development Research Paper of UN points that MDGs provide an explicit platform for concerted social and political action towards common goals. This paper also will focus on this aspect towards achieving MDGs in southern India.

In any society’s growth, developmental institutions played a greater role whether it is Plato’s academy or traditional universities like Nalanda and Thakshashila, for the knowledge produc-tion and dissemination. The institutional context has undergone dramatic changes in modern societies. In India, for considering a specific context of knowledge sharing and knowledge management, one of the national policies of government is an appropriate choice for the pro-duction and dissemination of knowledge through development institutions. The National Youth Policy 2003 recognizes that an inter-sectoral approach is a pre-requisite for dealing with youth-related issues and therefore, advocates the establishment of a co-ordinating mech-anism among the various Central Government Ministries and Departments and the community based organisations and youth bodies for facilitating convergence in youth related schemes, developing integrated policy initiatives for youth programmes. An enquiry is being done here to examine the policy perspective of a leading development institution in India and its contri-bution for the knowledge production and dissemination for the development of the nation. This paper pays attention to the concept of evidence based policy making and tries to find the answer to the critical question in this aspect like what sort of knowledge is being produced by development institutions and how it reflects in society by following the dictum – knowledge for development and what changes institutions were able to make through the national youth policy.