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…
There was a time when India had one of the finest statistical systems in the developing world. No matter how one interpreted the statistics that came out of that system, one could take the figures themselves as reasonably correct. This…
There’s been a lot of talk among policy makers in India about ensuring inclusion. The UPA government talked about “inclusive growth” and made it the headline for its Five Year Plan documents. The NDA government has dispensed with planning but…
As the air in India grows thick with accusations of being “anti-national”, it is worth taking a step back to consider what this means in political economy terms. After all, to characterise someone as “anti-national” you must first define what…
Unemployment has become so persistent a phenomenon in contemporary times that there is a common feeling that it is a “natural” state of affairs, that nothing can ever be done about it, and that the only way to have greater…
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act"— George Orwell The controlled voice of Ravish Kumar on a blackened screen and his stark report on NDTV India on February 19 made for a powerful statement.…
There are two basic, fundamentally different, and mutually exclusive positions on development that are in contention in the present period. One, which is the neo-liberal position, states that development requires rapid growth in the gross domestic product; that even if…
It has been clear for some time that the NDA-led central government is not particularly mindful of its legal obligations, particularly where rights-based laws are concerned. There has been continuing and blatant violation by the central government of Supreme Court…
A lot of the media discussion on the global economy nowadays is based on the notion of the “new normal” or “new mediocre” – the phenomenon of slowing, stagnating or negative economic growth across most of the world, with even…
As 2015 drew to a close the Finance Ministry released its Mid-Year Review (MYR), which summarised the official view of the state of play in the economy after a year-and-a-half of Modi-rule. As expected the MYR begins with the positives,…
