-The Hindu The UN Secretary General’s recent advice to India amounts to asking for its virtual de-industrialisation and stagnation The UN Secretary General António Guterres’s call for India to give up coal immediately and reduce emissions by 45% by 2030 is a call to de-industrialise the country and abandon the population to a permanent low-development trap. Piling on the pressure In an extraordinary move in climate diplomacy, Mr. Guterres, delivering the Darbari Seth Memorial...

-Hindustan Times Harsimrat is the only SAD representative in the Modi government. Union minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal on Thursday quit the Modi government opposing the farm bills that seek to liberalise the agriculture sector. The move came shortly after Shiromani Akali Dal president Sukhbir Singh Badal announced in the Lok Sabha that the minister will quit protesting the Centre’s anti-farmer move. Harsimrat Badal is the only SAD representative in the Modi government. The...

-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...

-The Indian Express While the over 3% agriculture growth in the first quarter factored in strong Rabi procurement, with high-price realisations getting reflected in the output numbers, fresh data from mandis indicate a slide in the prices of the intercrop produce — horticulture, milk and poultry etc. The rural sector may have held out the only sliver of hope amid the broader collapse in the first-quarter GDP numbers but there are fresh...

-The Hindu The crisis in agriculture demands that the government announce a strong fiscal stimulus for the rural economy A rather confident statement heard in the midst of India’s COVID-19-induced economic slowdown is this: “Agriculture will lead India’s economic revival”. But how valid is this claim put forward by government spokespersons and some observers? Four major arguments are offered. First, India’s food grain production in 2019-20 was 3.7% higher than in 2018-19. The...