-National Herald Maitreesh Ghatak, Professor of Economics at London School of Economics, in an interview to Tathagata Bhattacharya says the government has failed on many counts At the end of the day, it is growth and employment generation via new investment that is key to long-term economic progress. Various welfare schemes are a way of providing a social safety net to the poor in the short-run. It is performance along these two...

-The Hindu Business Line Hiking MSPs is not enough. The govt must work out a mechanism to provide income transfers to farmers The launch of a new umbrella scheme — Pradhan Mantri Annadata Aay Sanrakshan Abhiyan (PM-AASHA) — last week, is a response to the growing farmers’ anger over the last few years. Farmers have been demanding an assured income to emerge out of the continuing agrarian crisis. With open market prices...

-The Hindu Business Line The MCA database, which underpins the jump in factory GDP, is unconvincing. The ASI method was set aside for wrong reasons In early 2015, the Central Statistical Office (CSO) introduced a new series of National Accounts Statistics (NAS) with 2011-12 as the base year, replacing the earlier series with the base year 2004-05. It is the CSO's routine job to make such revisions, roughly once in a decade,...

-The Telegraph Centre hikes pay, still trails many states New Delhi: The Narendra Modi government on Tuesday decided to increase the honorarium the Centre pays anganwadi workers and accredited social health activists besides those working as auxiliary nurse midwives in a move trade unions saw as an election-eve sop to cap brewing discontent. The unions have been demanding the regularisation of these workers and helpers who last got a hike in 2011. State governments...

-The Indian Express As the elderly population grows, India faces new questions, must find new answers. During my childhood, we had a rather strict rule about having dinner together as a family. My grandparents were close to my father, and he to them. The cacophony of cross-conversations between grandparents, parents, cousins bore testimony to filial responsibility that had been deeply internalised by every generation. For a society in the throes of turbulent change,...