There are some people who are hard to classify, in terms of achievement or contribution to society or personality, and Ashok Mitra is one of them. Economist, policymaker, writer, organic intellectual, politician, litterateur, legislator: he has been all of these…
It is difficult to write about those whom you love. Curiously enough, the difficulty is not only because of the fear of excessive partiality: it is also because love brings with it the freedom to be exasperated. And intimacy creates…
Ashok Mitra was one of the most remarkable personalities of Independent India. A polymath who spanned technical economics, literature, policy and politics, he brought to all of these his distinctive flair, razor-sharp intelligence, and enormous energy and passion. His death…
If there has been one big change in the nature of the global economy in the second decade of this century, it is in global trade. In the first decade of this century, especially in the period 2002-08, cross-border trade…
The global economy, the soothsayers would have it, is riding the back of a recovery. Growth is seen as having consolidated in the US, picked up remarkably in Europe, and returned, after a minor blip, in China and India. Encouraged…
In discussions of global inequality, there is general agreement that, whatever else may have happened, within-country inequality has increased in most cases, even as between-country inequality has come down. But overall, because of the recent emergence of countries with large…
Globally, equity and bond markets are turning bearish. Analysts seem to be unanimous in their explanation: the era of cheap and abundant money, that was leveraged for investments in capital markets, is over. Governments and central banks are tiring of…
Across the country, farmers are furious – and rightfully so. Four years ago, they helped bring the BJP to power, believing Narendra Modi’s claims that they would no longer suffer official neglect. Cultivators were promised a doubling of their incomes…
For more than two years now, Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi has been in a state of turmoil. There is reason to conclude that this turmoil is no accident: it is the result of a set of decisions imposed…
In India, we tend to obsess a lot about the growth rate of national income, worrying if it drops even a tenth of a percentage point below market expectations, and checking fiscal and monetary indicators with respect to the value…
