-The Hindu There needs to be a road map to rescue private Industrial Training Institutes from their weak state Small shops, basements, tin sheds and godowns. These are not random workplaces but places where private Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) are running in the country. Disturbing facts such as these come from the report of the Standing Committee on Labour (2017-18) headed by Bharatiya Janata Party MP Kirit Somaiya, on the “Industrial Training...

-The Hindu Can India manage with a CERTain amount of disorder to sustain a plural vision of democracy? The current situation in Assam seems like a nightmare, a warning about the internal contradictions of democracy. It is a warning that the 19th century ideas of democracy as electoral-ism and the notion of the nation-state as a fetishism of borders may be inappropriate as imaginations for the 21st century. It is a caution...

-Firstpost.com Was that a bouncer to the political opposition or was that a googly to Prime Minister Narendra Modi from an esteemed colleague in the cabinet? Trying to decipher Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari's latest jibe at caste-based quota seekers in government jobs amid protests by Marathas in his home state of Maharashtra is as tricky as discussing the current valuations of Sensex stocks or whether Cheteshwar Pujara would have helped India...

-Livemint.com The job of policy strategists is always to identify the binding constraints to growth and then try to figure out which policies will help ease them Economists of a CERTain vintage will remember the old development models in which rapid economic growth was held back by three key constraints. The first was the savings constraint. A poor country such as India could not save enough of its annual national income to sustain...

-Ideas for India Commenting on the concept of evidence-based policy, Jean Drèze argues that the relation between evidence and policy needs further thought. Based on his involvement with social policy in India, he believes that while economists can contribute to more informed policy discussions and public debates they ought to be cautious in offering advice on policy design. Once upon a time, ‘evidence’ was widely confused with randomised controlled trials (RCTs). The...