-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...

-IANS NEW DELHI: India spends just a little over one per cent of its GDP on healthcare and this is leading the country into "a comprehensive healthcare crisis", according to Nobel laureate and noted economist Amartya Sen, who has called for greater allocation on healthcare in India and highlighted what he calls "three general failures" in the country's healthcare segment. "The fact that India allocates only a little over 1 per cent...

-Hindustan Times E Sreedharan says he also doesn’t agree that the Indian Railways has made rapid progress. He cites that apart from bio-toilets, there has been no technical upgradation and accident record has not improved either. Having revolutionised the way urban people commute, Elattuvalappil Sreedharan, 86, a retired civil engineer, has taken up the challenge of laying down standards for the metro rail system. In an interview with Ramesh Babu, the ‘Metro...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Human resource development minister Prakash Javadekar has announced plans to integrate 1,000 hours of compulsory skill training with the academic activities of undergraduate students to make them employable. But some academicians expressed fears that the move might dilute the main course for which they had enrolled themselves. "The BA, BCom and BSc students will get 1,000 hours of professional training. They will get 250 hours of training on soft...

-Livemint.com The ratio of currency in circulation as share of broad money is back at pre-demonetisation levels, according to Reserve Bank of India data On 8 November 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the “demonetisation” of high-value currency notes. When it became clear the ex ante goals of reducing corruption and black money were unlikely to succeed, attention shifted to a range of possible ex post facto rationales for the move. Numerous...