-The Hindu The national discourse is so superficial that it only talks of foreign direct investment, investment allowance, tax sops and the like which are just about a twentieth to a sixth of the national economy. It did not even notice paragraph 102 in the Union budget speech which is about half of India's economy. Commentators see facts hidden in budgets as the "devil's in the detail." This presumes that only...
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Corporate karza maafi at Rs. 36.5 trillion -P Sainath
-PSainath.org The revenues foregone in 2013-14 could fund the rural jobs scheme for three decades or the PDS for four and a half years. It was business as usual in 2013-14. Business with a capital B. This year's budget document says we gave away another Rs. 5.32 lakh crores to the corporate needy and the under-nourished rich in that year. Well, it says Rs. 5.72 lakh crores but I'm...
More »On the mythology of social policy -Jean Drèze
-The Hindu India is among the world champions of social underspending. Without enlightened social policies, growth mania is unlikely to deliver more under the new government than it did under the previous one Few people today remember the letter written on August 7, 2013 by Mr. Narendra Modi, then Chief Minister of Gujarat, to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In this letter, available on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) website, Mr. Modi criticised...
More »Harmful waivers
-The Hindu Business Line Loan write-offs will become redundant if we have a robust crop insurance system The Chief Minister of residual Andhra Pradesh N Chandrababu Naidu may have bought time in implementing his lavish pre-poll promise of waiving ₹54,000 crore worth of farm loans. The decision to appoint an expert committee to recommend guidelines on the waiver may well be a ploy to defer - even soften - the impact of...
More »The loud cries of farmers' widows have been lost in the din of the Narendra Modi coronation-Devinder Sharma
-DNA In the midst of the euphoria in the capital markets, after a strong mandate for Narendra Modi, the loud cries of wailing farm widows have been lost in the noise and cacophony that followed. To my mind, this is the biggest policy paralysis that afflicts the country. So when I heard Modi speak at the Central Hall of Parliament the other day: "Ours will be a government that thinks, works and...
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