In the absence of income or expenditure-based headcount ratio, the growth in the real wages (i.e., nominal wages adjusted against retail inflation) of the manual workers is considered to be a good proxy to assess the trends in poverty. This is because the manual, unskilled/ semi-skilled labourers exist at the bottom of the pyramid or economic hierarchy, and most of them belong to the social categories Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...

-ThePrint.in GST was supposed to create a unified market. The opposite is happening with small businesses being harassed with invoice and payments. The introduction of the Goods and Services Tax or GST was supposed to create a unified market of 1.4 billion people and encourage entrepreneurship and job creation. The other aim was to bring more and more firms into the formal sector of India’s economy, which will help expand the tax...

-TheWeek.in Well-off are doing fine; stagflation confined to middle and lower-middle classes Kaushik Basu, former chief economic adviser to the government and former chief economist of the World Bank, is currently teaching at Cornell University in the US. In an exclusive interaction, he talks about the current challenges before the Indian economy and its future growth prospects. Excerpts: Q/ Is the Indian economy moving in the right direction? A/ The performance of the Indian...

-Press release by the Right to Food Campaign Secretariat dated February 23, 2022 * 66 percent respondents said that their income has decreased compared to the pre-pandemic period * 80 percent reported some form of food insecurity, 25 percent reported severe food insecurity * 41 percent said that nutritional quality of their diet deteriorated compared to the pre-pandemic period * 67 percent could not afford cooking gas in the month preceding the survey. * 45...

-ThePrint.in MP-Bundelkhand is silently increasing its economic might, powered by its agricultural sector. Growth in Uttar Pradesh's Bundelkhand, on the other hand, has stagnated. With the ongoing assembly election in Uttar Pradesh ready to witness the third phase of polling on 20 February, covering the Bundelkhand region, we shift our focus towards the economies of a region that is often ignored in economic discussions. Earlier, we looked into Western and Eastern regions...