-Scroll.in Modi government’s flagship Ujjwala scheme continues to hand out new gas connections without fixing the problem of unaffordability. At the start of every monsoon, Doli Kumari’s family refills their LPG cooking gas cylinder and uses it for three or four months. As the rains recede in their village of Tarauna Bhojpur in Bihar’s Araria district, the family switches back to burning wood for daily cooking. This monsoon, however, the family PLAns not...

-The Indian Express With a more accurate way of measuring GDP growth, the pace of recovery is much slower in real terms Imagine driving a car whose speedometer cannot tell the current speed but only relative to what it was four hours ago. Apart from the comical encounters with police when stopped for speeding and the predicament in defining a “speed limit”, there is a more fundamental problem it would create. The...

-The Hindu Nod in new five-year-PLAn for hydroprojects near border with India A draft of China’s new Five-Year PLAn (2021-2025), which is set to be formally approved on March 11, has given the green light for the first dams to be built on the lower reaches of Yarlung Zangbo river, as the Brahmaputra is known in Tibet, before it flows into India. The draft outline of the new Five-Year PLAn (FYP) for 2025...

-Livemint.com The Centre’s PLAn to pay off food subsidy arrears is likely to distort our GDP readings for multiple years A puzzle of sorts has arisen—again—in India’s official gross domestic product (GDP) estimates. They don’t meet the smell test. Back in 2015, the Central Statistics Office’s practice of using ‘single deflation’ instead of ‘double deflation’ during a period of falling commodity prices had distorted growth prints, as per our analysis. This time, too,...

-Hindustan Times Women are not dropping out. They are being pushed out by the lack of demand for their labour. There has been movement out of agriculture into informal and casual jobs, where the work is sporadic, and often less than 30 days at a stretch. The new modern sector opportunities, especially in high value-added service sectors, mostly accrue to men. Why is women’s employment declining in India? The thrust of the...