-The Hindu An immediate stimulus is needed to regain the momentum to get India back to 8% growth The government’s move this past week to publish economic data for the April to June quarter of this year needs a look. The real growth of GDP, i.e. after removing the impact of inflation, was only 5.7%, much lower than expected. For the past six consecutive quarters, the growth rate has gone down steadily,...

-PTI Washington: Basu said from 2003 to 2011, India was growing typically over 8 per cent per annum. The year of global crisis, 2008, it dropped briefly to 6.8 per cent, but over 8 per cent growth had become the new norm for India. The downturn in India’s growth is “very worrying”, World Bank’s former chief economist Kaushik Basu said, underscoring that this is the “hefty price” the country had to pay...

-Huffington Post blog A result of dysfunctional municipal planning and governance. The flooding woes of Indian cities have hit the headlines yet again, with Mumbai, Chandigarh, Bengaluru and Agartala being among the worst affected. As for the response to these crises—there is enough evidence to indicate that the patchwork solutions that have been employed will work like steroid shots that might mitigate the issue temporarily, but worsen it in the future. Planning in...

-Firstpost.com The Narendra Modi government seems to have inherited Amitabh Bachchan's famous coin from Sholay. For, whichever way it falls, the government claims it has won. Its latest spin on demonetisation is yet another example of the government's 'heads we win, tails we win' arrogance. But, economy is not cinema. So, don't believe for a moment that the government was expecting almost all of the demonetised currency to return to the Reserve...

-The Indian Express A scrutiny of RBI’s earlier provisional disclosures and the government’s structured public remarks reveal a pattern: aware that much of the money would return, the government and the political establishment kept shifting the goalposts. New Delhi: “Tab (previous UPA) aawaz uthti thi ki kitna gaya, ab aawaz uth rahi hai ki kitna laye. Isse bada jeevan ka santosh kya ho sakta hai…Yahi toh sahi kadam hai…Woh zamana tha tab...