-The Financial Express With 66% of its population under the age of 35, India is home to the largest cohort of young people in the world-825 million. The median age of the country is just 27 years, much below 37 in the US and 46 in Japan. Numbers like these suggest that India has a competitive advantage over China and other Asian countries-a demographic dividend. But favourable demographics do not imply that...
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Into the abyss? -Jitendra
-Down to Earth The situation of India's farmers has only become grimmer in the past decade, according to the latest National Sample Survey Office report The lot of the embattled Indian farmer only keeps on getting worse with the passage of time. In the last 10 years, the voluminous debt of Indian agricultural households has increased almost four-fold whereas their undersized monthly income from cultivation has increased three-fold. Even the number of...
More »When amendment amounts to nullification -Ramaswamy R Iyer
-The Hindu Given industry concerns and the desire to accelerate industrialisation, the government could have reopened the debate on the land act. Instead, it has wholly accepted one perception of the conflict, and sought to undo the compromise embodied in the 2013 Act without a review This article will not go into the question of the propriety of the ordinance route to legislation in this case, but will try to present a...
More »Cash transfers, the lazy short cut -Mihir Shah
-The Hindu Alleviating poverty in India requires not only cash transfers but also other enabling changes Advocates of unconditional cash transfers claim that they can be both emancipatory and transformative. They argue that people are quite capable of making rational decisions. And that this kind of basic income support can improve their lives. I have no quarrel with the claim that we must trust the poor. Such suspicion is part of an elite...
More »Revisiting rural indebtedness - CP Chandrasekhar
-Frontline The problem in rural India is not one of too much credit to poor households that leads to debt waivers that damage bank balance sheets, but one of inadequate access to credit from formal sources. IF Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan is to be believed, efforts to help Indian farmers by providing them with cheap(er) credit and relieving them of an unsustainable debt burden only harms them in the...
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