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.…
As I write, roughly 10.3 million workers return home as the sun sets on 4.9 lakh worksites across the length and breadth of this vast country under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. About 23% are Scheduled Castes,…
In early January, the NDA-government’s Ministry of Finance sent out two contradictory signals. The first was a statement from Finance Minister Arun Jaitley that increased government spending on public investment would be used as an instrument to revive a sagging…
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…
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…
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…
