If an element of surprise is a hallmark of a good budget, then Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman can pride herself on having won the day on February 1. In a briefer than usual Budget speech, reflecting impatience to get to…
Implicit in the Budget is the hope that tax concessions will result in spending and also reviving GDP growth, and ‘incentivising’ the corporate sector will revive private investment The background to Budget 2025-26, as presented even by the official Economic…
Well-known Marxist scholar, the late Amalendu Guha, had argued persuasively that in modern India there co-existed in the minds of the people a dual national consciousness: a local, regional-linguistic nationality consciousness, of being a Bengali, or a Tamil, or a…
A CHORUS of “establishment” voices, from consultancy firms to the financial press, has been demanding a boost to domestic consumption as a means of reviving the flagging growth rate of the Indian economy. The latest to join this chorus is…
If a spate of recent headlines in the media is to be believed, the rupee is in free fall. That is true when the rupee’s value vis-à-vis the dollar is the sole focus. While the rupee stood at 84.1 to…
THE imperialist countries led by the US have been imposing unilateral sanctions that do not have any backing from the United Nations against countries that dare to defy their diktat. According to one estimate almost one third of the countries…
Liberal opinion is invariably opposed to “nationalism”. It treats “nationalism” as a homogeneous term that necessarily entails a non-friendly, non-accommodative and rivalrous attitude towards other countries. This view however is completely erroneous; anti-colonial third world nationalism is entirely different from…
The most recent annual report of the NSSO’s Periodic Labour Force Surveys indicate an increase in aggregate employment rates, after a prolonged period of decline and/or stagnation since 2011-12. This is dominantly due to a significant recovery and rise in…
The Indian newspapers have been full of stories about the fall of the rupee vis-à-vis the US dollar in the last few days. Just over a month ago, on November 27, the value of the dollar was Rs 84.559; by…
