-TheWire.in The journalist says that though there is a very clear pro-corporate intent behind the Bills, they may enable middle-men to wring an even harder grip on the farmers. Amidst an uproar and stiff protest, three contentious farm Bills were passed in the Rajya Sabha on Sunday and Tuesday. The Bills seek to replace ordinances promulgated in June this year and were already cleared by the Lok Sabha. The idea behind all the...

-TheWire.in Mexican economist David Barkin on India's neoliberal economics, growing inequalities, agrarian distress and more. David Barkin is Professor of Economics at the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City. He received his doctorate in economics from Yale University and was awarded the National Prize in Political Economics in 1979 for his analysis of inflation in Mexico. His research has focused on the development of an alternative to the capitalist economic model. In an...

-TheWire.in Has Switzerland’s eagerness to export its vocational training and education model to India led to an unsatisfactory compromise that ultimately hurts the battle against poverty: granting a private company exclusive rights to the curriculum developed with Swiss taxpayers’ money? This year, India and Switzerland will celebrate 70 years of a Friendship Treaty that was signed by the two countries in 1948. A decade ago, the 60th anniversary of the Treaty was...

-CaravanMagazine.in The economist Jean Drèze’s book, Sense and Solidarity, published in late 2017, deals with the impact of Aadhaar on social-welfare programmes, such as the National Food Security Act and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, among other things. Drèze was a member of the United Progressive Alliance government’s advisory council, which designed the NFSA and MGNREGS. He co-authored some of the essays in this book with colleagues and...

-Scroll.in At the heart of the problem is a discrepancy between two laws on rights for Adivasis to the bamboo growing on their traditional forestlands. Across the world, taxonomists have classified bamboo as a grass. But under Indian law, it was treated as a tree. This definition has long given state forest departments monopolistic control over the valuable natural resource. On November 23, the central government loosened this grip by amending the...