-The Hindu Business Line Pune: The protest against the Centre’s newly introduced farm laws is loudest in Punjab and Haryana, where the MSP mechanism is robust, benefiting wheat growing farmers. However, Government data shows that Madhya Pradesh farmers have steadily taken over wheat growers in Punjab and Haryana to reap benefits of MSP in the last five years. Data from rabi marketing seasons (RMS) 2016-17 to 2020-21 shows that 47,58,350 farmers from...

-The Hindu The protesting farmers need sincerity and accountability from the Centre, not edification In light of protests against the new farm laws, the Centre has attempted to educate farmers — a form of instrumental reasoning based on exchange of superior information and data — to convince them of the merits of its reform agenda. Since it is presumed that complex matters of economic policy are beyond the intellectual capacities of agrarians,...

-Hindustan Times Despite enhanced commitments across spheres, the government has spent less this year than it did last year Typically, when a crisis hits, the expectation is that the Centre — which has more revenue-raising abilities than states — will take the lead in preparing a fiscal road map, loosen its purse strings and raise expenditure significantly. The Covid-19 pandemic is unprecedented in its scale and impact. But this is also when...

The World Economic Outlook – a bi-annual publication of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) -- released in October 2020 has anticipated that the economic progress made by the countries since the 1990s to reduce poverty would be turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic. On top of that, economic disparity would rise too in the post-COVID world because the crisis has disproportionately impacted women, informal sector workers and people with...

-Hindustan Times An HT analysis of per capita worker incomes and per capita incomes in China and India showed that India’s gap with China was much larger when it came to per capita incomes than per worker incomes. India needs more women to join the workforce. According to the latest Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), only 25.9% of women between the ages of 15 and 49 were either working or looking for...