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…
The State in India, barring the Left-led governments, has never been committed to implementing redistributive land reforms and securing rights of tenants. After 1991, when India adopted the policies of liberalisation and globalisation, the government stopped paying even the lip…
The news that India’s rank in 2019 according to the Global Hunger Index (GHI) was 102nd among the 117 countries for whom this index was calculated (it is not calculated for countries where hunger is not a problem), instead of…
The debate over inequality has become hotter world-wide. While Trump had introduced substantial tax cuts for the rich in 2017, and Britain’s Boris Johnson, the front-runner to succeed Teresa May, has promised to do the same if he becomes Prime…
