-The Hindu Thanks to the caste system, India has always been an unequal society. What is even more worrying is that inequality appears to have deepened in the past two decades The Boston Consulting Group’s 15th annual report, “Winning the Growth Game: Global Wealth 2015”, has received extensive coverage in the Indian media. The report comes on top of the Global Wealth Databook 2014 from Credit Suisse, which provides a much more...
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The Importance of Being 'Rurban': Tracking Changes in a Traditional Setting -Dipankar Gupta
-Economic and Political Weekly A categorical distinction is facing rough weather--that between urban and rural. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in not just as external markets but as external inputs. Further, many of our villages barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker in towns is slowly...
More »In Maharashtra, suicide figures shoot through the roof -Priyanka Kakodkar
-The Times of India MUMBAI: Farmer suicides in Maharashtra are intensifying with as many as 1,088 cases reported in 2015 by the end of May. This is almost twice the figure reported just two months ago. Between January and March, the state government had reported 601 cases. The suicide rate had already begun climbing steeply with the onset of the drought last year which destroyed large swathes of crops. The unseasonal rain...
More »Early imports, higher wages under NREGA: Preparing for monsoon blues
-Hindustan Times Policy makers have no control over fickle weather whims and complex forecasts. Regardless of the eventual course and quality of summer rains brought on by drafts of breeze that stream 8,000 km from the southern Pacific, the early predictions did give an early heads up of what was likely in the next few months. Yet, every drought year, India’s response to deal with scanty summer rains has been knee-jerk, marked...
More »Weather department downgrades monsoon forecast to 88%, stokes drought fears; govt 'prays'
-Hindustan Times India’s June-September monsoon, the lifeblood of Asia’s third-largest economy, will most likely be “deficient” this year with the met department downgrading its forecast from 93% to 88%, earth sciences minister Harsh Vardhan said on Tuesday. The India Meteorological Department’s (IMD) revision -- which had forecast “below normal” monsoon in April -- will potentially toughen challenges for the Narendra Modi government already battling a farm crisis triggered by unseasonal rains in...
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