-The Telegraph The Nobel laureate economist described 'India as a poster child of what not to do' Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz made a strong case for spending money to combat the long-term economic damage of the pandemic, saying that India would be well advised to focus on containing the contagion as the economic aftermath cannot be tackled without tackling the pandemic. Bracketing India with Brazil and the United States for its “utter...

-Down to Earth Mounting expenses, under-provisioning of food subsidy budget leading to a huge debt is highly worrisome A fiscal crisis has been brewing in the last few years. Mounting food subsidy arrears — payable to the Food Corporation of India (FCI) due to ‘under-provisioning’ of food subsidy expenses in successive union budgets — has forced FCI to take loans to finance its operations. FCI is the central agency that manages procurement, storage...

-Hindustan Times The Centre’s attempt to bulldoze the states on agriculture weakens the entire reform process Days after Parliament passed the controversial agriculture bills, several state governments have begun crafting strategies to avoid its implementation. This is a predictable consequence of a process of law-making that undermines India’s federal consensus. Agriculture is a state subject. The passage of national laws, on a state subject, marks a rupture in India’s federal trajectory. There is...

-IndiaSpend.com Malegaon: Mushtaq Shaikh has done something consistently over the past three months that not many in India have been able to: He has been going to work. A worker at a power loom in Malegaon--250 km northeast of Mumbai--Shaikh, 44, is gradually getting back on his feet. “Our employers looked after us for the first three or four months [of the pandemic],” he told IndiaSpend on a recent September day, standing...

-NetworkIdeas.org The results of the long-awaited time use survey conducted over January to December 2019 by the NSSO have just been published. This finally allows policy makers and the general public to have some idea of the extent to which unpaid work and other activities determine the lives of people across India. Of course, there are some concerns with the survey methodology, which must be borne in mind while considering the data....