-The Hindu India has the technological capacity, the financial resources, and the need for a simple, transparent basic income scheme In 2010-2013, I was principal designer of three basic income pilots in West Delhi and Madhya Pradesh, in which over 6,000 men, women and children were provided with modest basic incomes, paid in cash, monthly, without conditions. The money was not much, coming to about a third of subsistence. But it was...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Prof. Abhijit Sen, a former member of the erstwhile Planning Commission, interviewed by M Rajshekhar (Scroll.in)
-Scroll.in The former Planning Commission member explains why the country needs to tread carefully on this idea. On January 1, when Indian news agency ANI asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi about the government’s plans to reduce agrarian distress, he said loan waivers do not work as a very small segment of farmers take loans from banks. “A majority of them take loans from money lenders,” said Modi. “When governments make such announcements,...
More »Govt denies kids cash for school -Basant Kumar Mohanty
-The Telegraph A sizeable portion of collections under the Primary Education Cess was never transferred to Prarambhik Shiksha Kosh The money every taxpayer pays towards the Primary Education Cess, meant to improve the quality of government schooling in the country, is not being used entirely for the purpose. A sizeable portion of the collections under the 2 per cent cess was never transferred to the Prarambhik Shiksha Kosh (PSK), the dedicated corpus...
More »A tale of two States: the differing politics of rural Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan -Vikas Pathak
-The Hindu With farm distress becoming a major electoral issue in the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha election, Vikas Pathak visits two pockets of rural India, Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh and Jodhpur district in Rajasthan, and finds that the political instincts of the rural voter are not necessarily rooted in agriculture. A few farmers sit huddled near a statue of Sardar Patel at Balaguda village in Mandsaur, Madhya Pradesh pouring out...
More »Three years ago, key statistics panel revised UPA growth up, Niti Aayog rejected it -P Vaidyanathan Iyer
-The Indian Express Then Chief Statistician T C A Anant confirmed that the release of data was withheld. “Niti Aayog had issues with a particular proxy we used for corporate sector growth estimates,” Anant told The Indian Express. In what adds a fresh twist to the controversy over the downward revision of UPA growth data, it is now learnt that almost three years ago, the Central Statistics Office (CSO), in the...
More »