-The Indian Express Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer introduced a paradigm shift in approach to alleviating poverty. The Nobel Prize in Economics for 2019 has been awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for “their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”. The approach, popularly known as Randomised Control Trial (RCT), has been the buzzword among development economists for almost two decades. Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer have used this technique (inspired...

-The Hindu Data on demonetisation’s contribution to the deepening economic slowdown may have been suppressed Was a task force report that recommended a new law to replace the more than 50-year-old Income Tax Act, 1961 suppressed because it inadvertently provided factual evidence for the debilitating impact of demonetisation on the formal corporate sector? On September 1-2, 2017, at the Rajaswa Gyan Sangam (an annual conference of senior tax administrators), Prime Minister Narendra Modi...

-The Indian Express This is the first time that the IPCC, whose job it is to assess already-published scientific literature to update our knowledge of climate change science, has focused its attention solely on the land sector. Pune: A new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released Thursday presents the most recent evidence on how the different uses of land — forests, agriculture, urbanisation — are affecting and...

-Livemint.com India’s actual growth rate over the past few years may have been in the range of 5-5.5% over the past few years, according to a new study Last month, a research paper by the former chief economic adviser to the finance ministry, Arvind Subramanian, reignited the controversy surrounding India’s GDP calculations. In his paper, Subramanian suggested that India’s growth rate in recent years had been grossly overestimated --- a claim that...

-Newsclick.in The draft National Education Policy reinforces outdated ideas about the goals of a foundational literacy programme Many children in elementary classrooms across India cannot read and write proficiently, as demonstrated on an annual basis by the Annual Status of Education Reports (ASER). This affects other school-based learning, as well as functioning in societies and economies that prize literacy. Capabilities of young children It was heartening, therefore, to see a chapter devoted to “Foundational...