-The Economic Times Those of us in our sixties, including our prime minister, will remember the goli soda. You used a little wooden gizmo to push in a marble stuck in the mouth of a bottle and guzzled the sweet, fizzy drink with the marble dancing around inside. Then you felt full and happy. But it was mostly gas. It’s feeling a lot like that these days, and PM Narendra Modi must...
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'Need revenue for public spending,' says Arun Jaitley on high petrol, diesel taxes
-PTI 'If public spending is slashed, it will mean cutting down expenditure on social sector scheme." There is hardly any private investment,' explained Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley provided no indication today of any cut in excise duty on petrol and diesel to cushion the spike in rates, saying that the government needs revenue to support public spending without which growth will suffer. States levy a high amount...
More »Demonetisation and the GDP: knock-out punch or mild tap? -Aarati Krishnan
-The Hindu The CSO has been consistent with its methods, allowing little room for suspicion of window dressing. Did demonetisation deal a knock-out punch to the Indian economy? Or was it just a mild tap from which it is already recovering? This debate should have been settled with the latest second advance estimates from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) which peg FY17 GDP growth at 7.1%. But commentators who believe that the economy...
More »The slow death of Kanpur's leather economy has fuelled UP's job crisis -Abhishek Waghmare
-Scroll.in / IndiaSpend.com Falling global demand, environmental regulations and contemporary cow politics have choked the leather economy of Uttar Pradesh's largest industrial city. Shadab Hussain, 23, dropped out of school at age 11 to work in a leather factory in Kanpur, the oldest and largest industrial city of India’s most populous state. To support his family, parents and four siblings, he worked eight-hour shifts every day for a monthly salary of Rs...
More »The overrated urban spinoff -Raghav Gaiha
-The Indian Express Agriculture’s contribution to poverty reduction is five times more than that of metropolitan centres Speaking at the third BRICS Urbanisation Forum in Visakhapatnam on September 14, Deputy Chairman of the Niti Ayog, Arvind Panagariya, announced that “Without cities we can’t grow rapidly”. He added, “urbanisation plays an important role in poverty alleviation”. Both claims are exaggerated and somewhat misleading. A recent report prepared for the UN points out that, over...
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