-The Hindu Business Line Asim Dasgupta, who was Finance Minister of West Bengal for 24 years, was probably the only CPI(M) member who attended Saturday’s event at the Central Hall of Parliament, on the eve of the GST’s launch. In fact, Dasgupta was Chairman of the Empowered Group of State Finance Ministers which prepared the first formulation of GST laws in 2009. He spoke to BusinessLine on the new indirect tax regime,...

-The Hindu Business line It must focus on human security and societal development rather than feed the avarice of a golden ghetto minority The discipline of economics has long been obsessed with gross domestic product as the base measure of development. Contemporary economic globalisation and its dominant neoliberal ideology see other considerations as not worth more than a passing glance. Neoliberalism, which used to be referred to as the Washington Consensus, was promoted by...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Congress today alleged that the Narendra Modi government was testing the waters on bringing agricultural income within the tax ambit and declared its intention to build a movement of farmers if the idea was implemented. "This government is harassing industrialists, traders, students, political rivals... only one section of the society was left, that is farmers," Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said. "The statements coming from important people in...

-Deccan Herald The last fig leaf of ‘voluntariness’ in Aadhaar dropped when the Lok Sabha passed the Finance Bill 2017 on March 22. The Finance Bill should never have been able to change Aadhaar, but we must remember that it was the same “money bill route” that gave birth to the Aadhaar Act a year ago. Classifying Aadhaar as a money bill was a brazen, unconstitutional and undemocratic strategy used to take...

-VillageSquare.in Recent amendments to laws that govern the use of land owned by tribals in Jharkhand has led to a rash of protests because local communities feel that they might lose their land and livelihoods to industrial development Last year in May, when the Jharkhand government announced to remove handcuffs from all the statues and pictures of Birsa Munda, the indigenous people of the state lauded the newly appointed first non-tribal chief...