While policy makers, analysts and observers paint a picture of an ongoing global economic recovery, the numbers seem to drag the optimists down. Barely days after IMF Managing Director, Christine Lagarde, declared at the spring meetings of the World Banka…
Narendra Modi government appears to have decided to privatise public sector banks (PSBs). Preparations are underway with arguments being marshalled that “there is no alternative” to privatisation. Privatisation (Download the full text in PDF format) (This article was originally published…
Last month the Supreme Court made two important pronouncements in the space of just a few days. One was on the question of who had ownership rights over the land at the Babri Masjid site; the other was on the…
Comrade B.T. Ranadive used to reminisce that in pre-independence Bombay (as it was then called) there would occasionally be impressive workers’ strikes at the call of Communist-led trade unions which were powerful in the city at that time, at which…
It is commonplace to note that women tend to have low status and little autonomy over much of Indian society. This is reflected in many distressing features that have persisted and even intensified in recent years despite all the talk…
In his speech to BJP workers in Delhi after the Assembly election results had been declared, Narendra Modi announced that his policy henceforth would be to empower the poor by providing them with opportunities, instead of handing out doles to…
There are many reasons to worry about and to be anguished by the communalisation of Indian politics and society that has proceeded apace over the last few decades. There is the general coarsening of the public discourse, which increasingly gets…
Perhaps no other public policy debate in post-independence India has seen as much of an “inversion of reason” on the part of the government as the demonetization debate. When critics were pointing, on the basis of government statistics themselves, to…
So maybe the demonetisation never really happened. Maybe it was all a bad dream: the late evening announcement, the subsequent cash crunch, the regulatory chaos, the deaths because people could not get medical treatment with old notes. Maybe the reporters…
There is a lot of buzz globally around the idea of a Universal Basic Income (or UBI). It is perceived as one way of coping with technology-induced unemployment that is projected to grow significantly in the near future, as well…
