After Sri Lanka and Pakistan, Bangladesh has become the third country in our neighbourhood to become afflicted by a serious economic crisis. It has asked for a $4.5 billion loan from the IMF, apart from $1 billion from the World…
Our key theme is the political economy of contemporary South Asia. At the core of these transformations are the fraught and so-called “truncated transition,” where South Asian societies are not making the transition from farm to factory, but the rise…
By far the most significant ‘innovation’ in industrial policy under the current NDA government is the production linked incentive (PLI) scheme. It provides an incentive pay out or subsidy of 4-6 per cent of incremental sales based on domestic production.…
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 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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
