There is much self-congratulatory back-slapping among governments, the World Bank officials and many economists about the “decline in poverty” that is supposed to have occurred between 1990 and the onset of the recent pandemic. This decline is claimed on the…
Prime Minister Modi was on the TV screens once again yesterday which marked the last day of the third month after his sudden announcement of lockdown at the end of March. This lockdown has plunged the entire economy into a…
The immediate need for universal food and cash delivery is by now obvious and urgent. Across the country, there are reports of people — migrant workers, local workers, peasants, pastoralists, fisherpeople, vendors, ragpickers, and the destitute — facing extreme hardship,…
The distress to which lakhs of migrant workers were suddenly exposed by the Narendra Modi government’s decision to announce a three-week-long lockdown at four hours’ notice with zero planning, has also highlighted a crucial aspect of the Indian economy. This…
The tragic irony could not have been more complete. The country is under lockdown, but thousands of migrant workers are thronging bus stands or marching on the roads, making a mockery of it; the aim of the lockdown is to…
This lecture will try to essentially look at the impact of COVID-19 on the Indian economy — though, as we all understand, we are at a point where we don’t know anything about a lot of things, as the future…
The global devastation caused by Covid-19 is only just beginning, with the severe threat to public health worsened by the evident inability to cope of most health systems across developing and developed countries. Many states across the world appear to…
If a head-load worker were to ask a bourgeois economist “Why does Ambani have so much wealth but I do not?”, that economist’s answer would be that Ambani has certain “special qualities” which the headload worker lacks. Bourgeois economists however…
The NDA government has recently declared that it had made an unannounced decision to trash the ‘draft’ report of the official consumer expenditure survey relating to 2018-19. These benchmark surveys, normally conducted every five years in the past, are the…
The National Statistical Office (NSO) has decided not to release the quinquennial survey data on consumer expenditure for 2017-18. This is because these data, leaked by The Business Standard (Nov.15) show a drop of 3.7 percent in real per capita…
