Just before Dhanteras and Diwali this year, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) released the November edition of its monthly bulletin. The latest RBI Monthly Bulletin says that the GDP has contracted by -8.6 percent in the second quarter of fiscal year 2020-21 (i.e. July-September, 2020) as compared to the gross domestic product (GDP) during the corresponding period last year. It may be noted that India’s GDP shrunk by -23.9...
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Can the right to work be made real in India? -G Sampath
-The Hindu It can be made workable if there is political will and fiscal resources As economies around the world struggle to recover from the double whammy of a pandemic and a lockdown, unemployment is soaring. In India, the land of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the promise of jobs and the politics of unemployment have a long history. Can a citizen demand work as a right, and...
More »Do recent indicators hint at a real economic revival? -Vikas Dhoot
-The Hindu After India’s economy collapsed in the first quarter of 2020-21 following the nationwide lockdown imposed to curb the COVID-19 pandemic, some economic indicators from September and October, from power consumption to GST collections, suggest that things are improving. But is this a sustainable recovery under way, or just an expression of pent-up demand combined with India’s festive-season spending? In a conversation moderated by Vikas Dhoot, Naushad Forbes and M....
More »Growth compulsions, fiscal arithmetic -C Rangarajan and DK Srivastava
-The Hindu The economic situation warrants enhanced government expenditure; the policy challenge is to minimise the growth fall India’s growth in the first quarter of 2020-21 at (-) 23.9% showed one of the highest contractions globally. Global growth prospects for 2020 have been projected by a number of multilateral institutions and rating agencies including that for India. The 2020-21 Real GDP Growth for India is forecast in the range of (-) 5.8%...
More »An economic disaster foretold -Amit Bhaduri and Deepankar Basu
-The Hindu The reported contraction of the economy is likely an underestimate for reasons of omission and commission According to data released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation of the Government of India on August 31, 2020, real quarterly GDP contracted by a whopping 23.9% between April-June 2019 and April-June 2020. This magnitude of real GDP decline is unprecedented since the country started publishing quarterly GDP estimates in 1996. This...
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