The Q4 GDP Estimates for 2022-23
The estimates of India’s Gross Domestic Product for the fourth quarter of 2023 were released on May 31. These show a growth rate of 6.1 per cent over the fourth quarter of the previous year, which is higher than the…
The Grim Unemployment Scenario
The data on unemployment brough out by the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE) present a grim picture. Not only has the unemployment rate increased sharply for some years now, starting from even before the pandemic, but the figure…
The Current State of India’s Economy
Government officials never tire of repeating that India is currently the fastest growing major economy in the world. What they never mention is the fact that India had witnessed perhaps the sharpest absolute drop in GDP among the major economies…
The Rubber Farmers’ Woes
Rubber prices, which had recovered a little after the fall during the pandemic, have collapsed again, with the farmers in Kerala, which grows 80 per cent of the country’s rubber crop, being badly hit. The central government has flatly refused…
Treating Infrastructure as a Holy Cow
There is an impression shared by even progressive intellectuals that the entity that goes by the name of “physical infrastructure” is an absolute necessity in each country, and that the actual amount of infrastructure that exists is always less than…
Finance Minister’s Misleading Statement
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman made a misleading statement the other day that is not expected from a responsible member of the union cabinet. Talking about the resource transfer to the states in the recent budget, she said that the magnitude…
Tightening the Screws
We all know that the Narendra Modi government has strong centralising tendencies — not just between the Centre and the state governments but even within Central ministries, with the Prime Minister’s Office and the ministry of home affairs being the…
The Abuse of the Concept of “Populism”
All regimes based on class antagonism require a discourse to legitimise class oppression and this discourse in turn requires a vocabulary of its own. The neoliberal regime too has developed its own discourse and vocabulary and a key concept in…
The Real Failure at Sharm El-Sheikh
As COP27, the climate summit at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, ended after a being prolonged, assessments of what it achieved were mixed. But tthe overwhelming sense was that the summit had yielded little, since on most counts it had not…
The Triumph of the City?
The triumph of the City of London, the one square kilometre next to Liverpool Street station that houses the citadel of British finance, is complete. Not only did it get rid of one British prime minister, whom it distrusted, in…