-The Economic Times Think for a moment that you are a small or marginal farmer of wheat or rice, and the government promises to give to your family wheat at Rs 2 per kg and rice at Rs 3 per kg (5 kg per person per month). What would you do? You would rush to sell your produce to the government at the minimum support price (MSP), which is currently Rs...
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Two chaiwallahs and a budget -Sowmya Kidambi
-The Hindu Unlike the success story of the tea stall owner who became Prime Minister, there are many others whose dreams have been forgotten. But their lives have been rebuilt by MGNREGA Right next to the village home in Devdungri, Rajsamand, Rajasthan where I lived and worked with Mazdoor Kisan Shakthi Sangathan from 1998, live Chiman Singh and his wife Meera. Both of them used to migrate to Ahmedabad for six months...
More »Still smug about the high growth years? -Ashoak Upadhyay
-The Hindu Business Line Drop the euphoria for a moment - a third of India is seriously poor. And urban poverty has risen sharply The latest report on the number of poor Indians shows a third of the population living below the recalibrated poverty lines. C Rangarajan, a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India and former chairman of the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council, was asked to look into the matter...
More »On the mythology of social policy -Jean Drèze
-The Hindu India is among the world champions of social underspending. Without enlightened social policies, growth mania is unlikely to deliver more under the new government than it did under the previous one Few people today remember the letter written on August 7, 2013 by Mr. Narendra Modi, then Chief Minister of Gujarat, to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In this letter, available on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) website, Mr. Modi criticised...
More »Get over the growth fetish -Ashish Kothari
-The Hindu Business Line Perpetual growth is a piece of nonsense. The focus should be on protecting livelihoods through sustainable means Construct a building, demolish it, reconstruct, break it down again, and go on repeating this meaningless exercise. You will have economic growth, as currently measured. But no net gain in employment during the endless cycle of construction and demolition, no net increase in productive capacity, and no appreciable change in poverty...
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