-The Indian Express The new year could witness the first national elections being fought on farmers’ issues. And it could test both the ruling BJP pushed to the defensive, particularly in the larger sugar-producing states, and the Congress under pressure to deliver loan waivers If 2017 saw the beginnings of agrarian unrest in large swathes of the country, 2018 brought it centrestage as the numero uno political issue. And almost everyone’s...

-TheWire.in "The central government’s contribution to old-age pensions...has stagnated at just Rs 200 per month since 2006. This is unfair." New Delhi: Sixty economists from across the country have written to finance minister Arun Jaitley, asking him to ensure that social security pensions and maternity benefits get adequate attention in the Union Budget 2019. They argue that they had made a similar “modest” request before the 2018 Budget, but it went unheeded. The...

Passionate about the deepening of agrarian crisis, quite often journalists and media persons cite figures related to farm suicide (as provided by the National Crime Records Bureau) in order to draw the attention of the readers. They do so in the following ways: * Compare the absolute number of farm suicides (viz. suicide by cultivators + suicide by agricultural labourers) across regions/ states for a particular time point or time period...

-The Hindu Occupational identities are competing with caste and religious identities in Madhya Pradesh The political mood of the people in Madhya Pradesh is complex. To understand voting behaviour only through the prism of caste is an outdated method in this State. In fact, occupational identities resonate across caste and religion. Employing the categories of farmers, labourers, government employees, small businessmen, the urban service classes, and so on helps us understand voter...

-NetworkIdeas.org India is often mistakenly seen as a country with relatively low economic inequality. In fact, there were always very significant economic inequalities in India, which intersected with social and locational inequalities in complex ways. More significantly, the country’s inequalities widened after the internal and external economic liberalization measures from the early 1990s, which attracted global financial investors and boosted economic growth considerably. The estimates of low inequality are usually based on...