After months of dilly-dallying the Reserve Bank of India has finally come out with the figure that nearly 99 percent of the currency notes demonetized in November 2016, came back to the banking system. The total value of demonetized currency,…
Narendra Modi’s attempt to imitate Jawaharlal Nehru by giving a mid-night speech on July 1 at the Central Hall of parliament, while inaugurating the Goods and Services Tax, could perhaps be passed off as a merely laughable idiosyncrasy. His equating,…
Volume II of the Economic Survey which was brought out by the Ministry of Finance a few days ago paints an extremely grim picture of the Indian economy. The growth rate of real Gross Value Added (GVA which is the…
The Draft National Education Policy unveiled by the central government puts forward a bizarre line of reasoning. Education, it is argued on the basis of a long-held and honourable belief going back to the Kothari Commission, should have an annual…
Exactly twenty years ago, a major financial crisis had hit the countries of East and South East Asia in July 1997. This crisis was a watershed in the history of third world development, in the sense that these “tiger economies”…
When one reaches a certain age, one has to steel oneself to the idea of hearing periodically the news of one’s friends passing away. But when the passing of several friends gets concentrated within a very short span of time,…
The Modi government’s record in tacitly supporting the actions of a bunch of vigilante thugs who have been terrorizing the country, especially the Muslims and the dalits, in the guise of gaurakshaks, or opponents of love jihad, or “nationalists”, has…
The term “globalization”, though much used, is extremely misleading, as is its presumed “other”, “nationalism”. This is because both terms are used as blanket terms without any reference to their class content, as if there can be only one kind…
The Modi government is completing three years in office amid much fanfare and propaganda about its achievements during this period. Aiding this propaganda is the advance estimate of GDP which projects a growth-rate of 7.11 percent for 2016-17, a shade…
At the last Spring meeting of the IMF and the World Bank, Christine Lagarde, the Managing Director of the IMF, had confidently stated that the world economy was on the path of recovery, a view echoed by most official soothsayers…
