The Narendra Modi government is winding up the National Development Council, an apex body consisting of the Prime Minister, the concerned central cabinet ministers, and all state chief ministers together with their concerned cabinet colleagues, which supervised the planning process…
The WTO has been a major weapon used by the advanced countries to roll back the structures that the third world dirigiste regimes which came into existence after decolonization had erected for achieving a degree of self-reliance. The TRIPS agreement…
The central government sets up a Pay Commission about once every ten years to recommend what the structure of salaries, allowances and pensions for its current and retired employees should be. The seventh Pay Commission had been set up accordingly…
The closest friend I had in my childhood was a boy who came from a dalit family. He lived in a little bustee near our house in the small mofussil town in Odisha where I spent my early years. He…
At first sight the “Make in India” campaign appears innocuous, a pipe-dream perhaps but a rather harmless one. If the world’s big companies come to “make” things in India for selling all over the world, which is the thrust of…
The Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) is named after a young Left-wing theatre activist who was beaten to death by goons while performing a street play in support of striking workers in Sahibabad on the outskirts of Delhi. It is…
The Chinese central bank’s decision last week to let the yuan depreciate in three stages by almost 4 percent against the U.S. dollar, was officially explained as a move towards greater market determination of its exchange rate. Though this explanation…
There is a strong view in certain Left circles, especially in certain European Left circles, that any de-linking from global capitalism conduces to a promotion of domestic reaction. Of course, even in Europe this is not necessarily the dominant view…
I don’t know about the sciences, but in the social sciences in the old days every undergraduate student in Oxford and Cambridge was required to write two essays per week which were then discussed with the tutors. It was hard…
The debate so far on the Goods and Services Tax (GST) has been largely concerned with the question of compensation to the states for the losses they may suffer owing to the transition to a GST regime. The losses to…
