-Live Mint   What explains the mystery of job growth slowing so drastically just when growth spiked up so rapidly? The health of the economy occupied the centrestage of the political battlefield this week, as the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and the opposition National Democratic Alliance (NDA) engaged in a spirited debate on India's economic performance. A major bone of contention was the slower pace of job growth in the UPA's 10-year...

-The Business Standard The dominant theme in the pre-election discourse is that misrule by the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in its second term has led to sharply lower growth of gross domestic product (GDP), which Narendra Modi will reverse, the way he has made Gujarat shine. But the evidence on hand does not support this correlation between the quality of national political leadership and growth performance. If anything, there is...

-Live Mint Mint examines why millions of women are missing from farms, factories, colleges, and offices in India, which has one of the lowest ratios of working women in the world Mumbai: Every monsoon, minivans ferrying women labourers can be seen making their way from the small sleepy town of Wardha to Waifad village, 18 kilometres away. Urban workers from Wardha have come to occupy an integral part of Waifad's farm...

-Live Mint The scheme represents Rs.2.3 trillion spent on wasteful rural consumption This week marked the eighth anniversary of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government's key rural intervention, launched in 200 districts initially in February 2006. To the extent that such populist schemes helped raise wages without raising productivity. They have contributed more to inflation than to rural wealth. Worse, such schemes have...

-The Business Standard The challenge to anti-inflation policy lies in better institutions and better evidence-based policy Our failure to rein in inflation has been costly. Economically, it has hurt growth. Poor and urban middle-class households have been affected the most. A combination of slowing growth and high inflation has weakened our macro-fundamentals: households fled financial savings, domestic and foreign investors lost confidence, and the rupee plunged. Politically, it has been a disaster. For...