A rural Indian spending Rs. 22.50 a day would not be considered poor by a Planning Commission whose Deputy Chairman's foreign trips between May and October last year cost a daily average of Rs. 2.02 lakh Pranab Mukherjee's stirring call for austerity tugs at the national tear ducts. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has pleaded for it in the past and watched his flock embrace it creatively. With the Finance Ministry even...
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Cooking gas and kerosene subsidies call for urgent reform
-The Economic Times Open-ended consumption subsidies on petroleum products have wrought havoc on government finances. Reportedly, the trio of public sector oil marketing companies have of late blocked some 3.8 million parallel household connections of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), in a bid to rationalise the subsidy outgo. The move to weed out multiple LPG connections does make sense. But we need to keep the big picture in mind and overhaul the pricing and...
More »Microfinance Bill will regulate the sector to death, to the joy of moneylenders
-The Economic Times, The Cabinet has cleared a proposed Bill empowering the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to regulate all microfinance institutions (MFIs). A central legislation makes sense only to the extent that it over-rides draconian state-level laws. However, the Bill suffers from many infirmities. And it is unfortunate that these have been overlooked. The law, if enacted, is likely to kill small MFIs and hurt the sector that is struggling...
More »And pension for all-Jayati Ghosh
A universal pension scheme for social protection must be part of a broader strategy of economic expansion different from the present neoliberal order. INDIA must be one of the worst countries in the world in terms of not providing even minimal social security for most of its people. This is not just a major failure of the development project in the country – it is also a significant cause of...
More »MORE EVIDENCE ON THE NEED FOR OLD-AGE PENSION
Just in case our friends in the media were looking for more evidence, a new ILO report clinches the connection between old age pension and a country’s well being. The ILO report “World Social Security Report 2010/11: Providing coverage in times of crisis and beyond” puts India’s social security coverage in perspective of its peers. (the report can be accessed at http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/---publ/documents/publication/wcms_146566.pdf. India is not only nearly at the bottom...
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