-The Hindu The politics of patronage and personality in the State has reduced the electorate to passive recipients of welfare. “The food is good. The place is clean. Actually, I prefer the cleanliness over the menu,” P. Divaraj chuckles. “The real reason I’m here is because it’s the end of the month and I’m running out of money.” A 10-minute walk from his office to Amma Unavagam on Santhome High Road in...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Kejriwal government fails colonies awaiting a legal tag
-Hindustan Times New Delhi: The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) after taking power in the Capital a year ago pledged support for people living in unauthorised colonies and slum clusters, adopting a strong stand against demolition of such structures without proper rehabilitation. But the Arvind Kejriwal-led government has failed to turn around the fortunes of the residents of these bustling neighbourhoods, many of them with no legal electricity or water supply. Analysts say lack...
More »The Importance of Being 'Rurban': Tracking Changes in a Traditional Setting -Dipankar Gupta
-Economic and Political Weekly A categorical distinction is facing rough weather--that between urban and rural. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in not just as external markets but as external inputs. Further, many of our villages barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker in towns is slowly...
More »Land acquisition: First, sow the seeds of security among farmers -Abhijit Banerjee
-Hindustan Times Many years ago, Jagdish Bhagwati, a very distinguished economist long before he became one of the patron saints of the NDA, published an important paper on what he called Directly Unproductive Activities or DUP. These bore a close relation to what his friend and well-known South Asia scholar, Anne Krueger, had called rent-seeking activities in some slightly earlier work. Both made the important point that the social cost of...
More »Potato glut & price slump drive 8 farmers to commit suicide in Bengal -Phalguni Banerjee
-The Times of India KOLKATA: A potato glut and plunging prices have triggered suicides in Bengal's Hooghly, Burdwan and Bankura districts. Hooghly alone reported six of them. Prices have crashed, one kg of the tuber selling for Rs 3 to Rs 4. With the pressure unlikely to ease in the near future, peasants face an uncertain future and are agitating. In 2013, Bengal's farmers reaped a good harvest of 85 lakh tonnes...
More »