-Frontline.in Hidden in the Modi government’s Budget promises to India’s farmers, who are in distress, is the admission: we have failed you. No section of society has perhaps fared worse under the Narendra Modi regime than small peasants and agricultural labourers. Rural India, particularly peasants, voted in large numbers for the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in 2014. Once in power, the NDA government promised to double the incomes...

-The Hindu Business Line The government should explain constant variations in GDP figures. India’s reputation for data credibility could suffer “The (revised GDP) numbers are the result of a hatchet job” tweeted former Finance Minister P Chidambaram after the Modi government published the back-series GDP data late November. Ahmed Patel, his colleague in the Congress party, added his bit: ‘In its desperate attempt to re-write GDP data, the government resembles a student...

-The Hindu The Interim Budget makes clear the class hierarchy in the Modi government’s scheme of populism Interim Budget 2019 has sought to make amends for all the wrongs of almost five years of the Narendra Modi government. For example, the debilitating impact of demonetisation on the informal sector that employs nearly 90% of the workforce had long been suspected on the basis of anecdotal evidence. The findings of the National Sample...

-ThePrint.in British economist Angus Deaton, a 2015 Nobel Prize winner, and French economist Thomas Piketty are helping Congress shape its minimum income scheme. New Delhi: Angus Deaton, the British economist who won the Nobel Prize in 2015, and French economist Thomas Piketty are advising the Congress on its ambitious poll promise of minimum income guarantee (MIG) to the poor, party leaders have told ThePrint. Congress president Rahul Gandhi declared Monday that the party...

-The Indian Express Repeated government interventions in official data release run the risk of denting market trust in it The controversy over two top functionaries of the National Statistical Commission (NSC) resigning in protest over the NSSO (National Sample Survey Organisation) withholding its new employment survey adds to a growing list of government interventions in data releases. There is a common theme — the government is seen to take an adversarial...