As the Modi government completes two years in office, one of its major economic programmes—the Make in India initiative—that promised manufacturing growth based on exports, is staring at failure. According to the most recent monthly figure available at the time…
The term “involution” – which means to turn into oneself, or to shrink, or to reverse a process of evolving – may seem like a strange one to apply to societies. Yet that is the term that increasingly comes to…
Before the last general elections, two supposedly contrasting images of Narendra Modi were projected by the media: Modi, as the development man and Modi, as the Hindutva crusader. It was argued that he won the elections because of his development…
There are some people who are hard to classify, in terms of achievement or contribution to society or personality, and Ashok Mitra is one of them. Economist, policymaker, writer, organic intellectual, politician, litterateur, legislator: he has been all of these…
Meeting in mid-April on the side lines of the spring sessions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund at Washington D.C., Finance Ministers of the G20 countries seemed overcome by a combined sense of despair and fear about…
One is witnessing the emergence of a strange and unprecedented phenomenon in the advanced capitalist world, namely the charging of negative interest rates. The European Central Bank reduced its deposit rate to -0.1 percent in June 2014, and since then…
At the end of March, Indian private sector steel major Tata Steel, flagship firm of the Tata group, announced that it was closing its steel operations in the UK that are reportedly bleeding losses at the rate of one million…
There was a time when India had one of the finest statistical systems in the developing world. No matter how one interpreted the statistics that came out of that system, one could take the figures themselves as reasonably correct. This…
Thousands of steelworkers’ jobs are threatened as Indian company Tata threatens to walk away from its loss-making business in the UK. The move is causing shockwaves over the health of Britain’s manufacturing industry; but it is also a strong indicator…
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…
