-ThePrint.in K-shaped recovery means the growing gap between ‘winners and losers’. An example in India is the stock market being healthy while millions have lost their jobs. Amidst the flood of commentary that followed the finding that the world’s fastest-growing large economy had become its fastest-shrinking one, an observation that stood out was that India’s growth potential had dropped from 6 per cent to 5 per cent. Now, it has been obvious...

-The Telegraph How did unorganized labour become invisible? Thanks to a humongous oversight on the part of the government, India’s unorganized labour has suddenly become a vivid, long-running story. Photographers walk with families undertaking unimaginable journeys. Reporters tail them in SUVs. Their faces and daily tragedies have dominated newspaper headlines and television news for two months running, something nobody would have ever thought possible. Since when did hyperventilating news channels focus on...

-ThePrint.in Under the Modi government, the MGNREGS has suddenly become both an indicator of rural stagnation as well as the proposed solution to it. Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar had told the Lok Sabha in July this year that the Narendra Modi government was “not in favour of continuing with” the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme for long.  While MGNREGS’ target group is the rural poor, the Modi government’s...

-Business Standard Aiming for unachievable growth rates would compound past errors. The economy has to lower its sights, and do some hard thinking about how to come out of the present hole, writes T N Ninan There is a general sense that the economic growth problem came upon us suddenly in the last few months. In some ways, it did — for example, through the continuing fallout of the collapse 11 months...

-Business Standard When there is an enormous shortage of public hospitals, when state expenditure on health care is abysmally low by any international yardstick, tax money should be used to set up public hospitals Most relatively well-off Indians have got used to the idea of taking out medical insurance policies in order to take care of possible health episodes. It has been a rapidly growing business, doubling in four or five years....