-Newsclick.in “Our population today is around 136 crore. Where will you get food grains for them through zero budget farming? This is sheer madness.” There is an inherent seductive charm to the term zero budget natural farming, for it makes the arduous occupation of agriculture appear beguilingly simple, an economic proposition without any risk or even requirement of capital. Coined by the Vidarbha-based farmer, Subhash Palekar, who was bestowed with the Padma...

-The Indian Express The budget needed to break new ground, provide a thrust to a slowing economy. This budget lacks innovation. Economics has never been a strong point of the NDA government. Its only two major economic forays, demonetisation and the GST, have both turned out to be pretty disastrous. It was futile, therefore, to expect much from the Union Budget for 2019-20. Even so, one is surprised by the budget’s...

-TheWire.in The survey also conferred a lot of credit on the Centre’s move in 2015 to implement direct benefit transfer and Aadhaar-linked payments when it comes to workers' wages. New Delhi: In tacit acceptance of the sudden surge in demand for jobs under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) following the demonetisation move of the government in 2016, the Economic Survey (released this July 4) has called for using...

In a recent blog post, Columbia University professor Arvind Panagariya mentions that the critics of the present Prime Minister of India failed to underscore ‘employment rate’ -- flip side of unemployment rate -- that stood at nearly 94 percent according to the report on Periodic Labour Force Survey 2017-18. A recent article by Dr. Vikas Rawal and Prachi Bansal, however, points out that in order to understand the problem of joblessness...

-Livemint.com If there is no way to tell which part of the economy is doing well and which is not, policymakers will continue to have to rely on rough proxies and their intuition for decision-making A month after statisticians from the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) published a report exposing holes in one of the key databases used in India’s gross domestic product (GDP) calculations the controversy around India’s new GDP series...