In Search of Clean Air
Saturday 7 February was voting day in the capital city of Delhi. So it was effectively a holiday for many workers, who only had to walk to their polling stations to cast their votes for the Assembly elections. This meant…
Banking on FDI
Recognising the well-known fact that in terms of industrial growth India has fallen behind many of its former peers such as Brazil and South Korea, the NDA government has made the revival of manufacturing the centre piece of its economic…
Revisiting Rural Indebtedness
If Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan is to be believed, efforts to help Indian farmers by providing them with cheap(er) credit and relieving them of an unsustainable debt burden only harms them in the long run. In his…
Skills Mismatch and All that
One of the most commonly heard platitudes about the labour market in India is that it is characterised by severe “skills mismatch”. And this in turn is presented as the chief problem of the labour market and the main cause…
The “Niti Ayog”
The Planning Commission, set up under Jawaharlal Nehru’s Prime Ministership, was a logical expression of an idea that underlay India’s anti-colonial struggle, namely that in independent India, an improvement in the material conditions of life of the people, subjugated and…
Prof. Bhagwati has Got it Wrong
Prof. Jagdish Bhagwati has written an invited article on the front page of Economic Times on January 9. He has made a strong case for Narendra Modi’s Make in India (and sell abroad) campaign and has urged the Prime Minister…
Rural Diversity and Diversification
Economic diversification in rural India, involving the emergence and growth of non-agricultural activities, is considered an important means of increasing employment and per capita incomes, and improving standards of living. However, non-agricultural activities themselves are of various kinds differing in…
Asian Banks in Trouble
Emerging Asia, analysts argue, is all wrapped up in debt. For some time now they have warned about the dangers involved in the rising volume of private debt—both corporate and household—in Asia, as a result of a reversal of the…
The RBI Governor’s Unwarranted Remarks
The Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Dr. Raghuram Rajan, while inaugurating the annual conference of the Indian Economic Association at Udaipur on the 27th of December, questioned the wisdom of the debt-waiver scheme for agriculturists, which the UPA…
Make in India
The website is impressive, no doubt about it. It is sleekly designed and easy on the eye, and it appears to offer a lot of information on what is supposed to be the Modi government’s ambitious new initiative to transform…