-The Economic Times Those of us in our sixties, including our prime minister, will remember the goli soda. You used a little wooden gizmo to push in a marble stuck in the mouth of a bottle and guzzled the sweet, fizzy drink with the marble dancing around inside. Then you felt full and happy. But it was mostly gas. It’s feeling a lot like that these days, and PM Narendra Modi must...

-Scroll.in JNU professor Himanshu says the economic slowdown is not the result of a one-off event like demonetisation, the slump began almost two years ago. The economy is in a trough. The first quarter of 2017-2018 saw the growth of gross domestic product (the total value of all goods and services produced in a country in a year) drop to 5.7% from 7.9% in the corresponding period last year – the...

-The Hindu An immediate stimulus is needed to regain the momentum to get India back to 8% growth The government’s move this past week to publish economic data for the April to June quarter of this year needs a look. The real growth of GDP, i.e. after removing the impact of inflation, was only 5.7%, much lower than expected. For the past six consecutive quarters, the growth rate has gone down steadily,...

-Livemint.com Farm loan waivers are a bad idea. They were a bad idea in 2008 when the UPA was in power, and continue to be so in 2017 with the NDA in power Several parts of India are in the grip of an agrarian crisis. In part, this is because of the cumulative effect of bad monsoons. Farmers in many parts of India are still dependent on the annual rains which were deficient...

-The Financial Express The one irrefutable lesson from MGNREGA, is that once introduced, there will be no going back India is one of the most unequal countries in the world. In terms of Gini coefficient, i.e., measure of income inequity, India ranks a dismal 135 out of 187 countries. This means that most of the prosperity that an increasingly economically liberalised India is seeing, belongs primarily to the top-income percentiles. One in...