-Press release by NREGA Sangharsh Morcha and Peoples' Action for Employment Guarantee (PAEG) dated 9 July, 2019 Even as many parts of the county suffer from drought, the new government at the centre has allocated a mere Rs 60,000 crores for the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) for the ongoing financial year. This is Rs 1,084 crore less than the revised budget estimate for 2018-19. Expenditure would have been much...
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A Budget that goes nowhere -C Rammanohar Reddy
-The Hindu It would seem that since the government is unable to catalyse domestic investment or fund public investment, it is now turning abroad to fuel growth Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is mistaken if she thinks her first Budget is going to revive a slowing economy. The economy grew by just 5.8% in real terms in the last quarter of 2018-19. Yet, the Union Budget for 2019-20 assumes that the economy will...
More »Reimagining the NITI Aayog -Vijay Kelkar & Abhay Pethe
-The Hindu The institution can play an important role in refreshing India’s fiscal federalism India’s Constitution-makers thought of India as a union of States with a centripetal bias, done, advisedly, to preserve the unity and integrity of a newly fledged nation. Since then, the Indian economy, polity, demography and society have undergone many changes. The new aspirational India is now firmly on a growth turnpike. It is in this context that we...
More »Squandering the gender dividend -Sonalde Desai
-The Hindu It is a national tragedy that women unable to find work are dropping out of the labour force If labour force survey data are to be believed, rural India is in the midst of a gender revolution in which nearly half the women who were in the workforce in 2004-5 had dropped out in 2017-18. The 61st round of the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) recorded 48.5% rural women above...
More »Pronab Sen, former chief statistician of India, interviewed by Kabir Agarwal and Anuj Srivas (TheWire.in)
-TheWire.in "I think the fact that the whole [NSSO] exercise began with a fundamental premise of keeping it comparable, that has been forgotten." The fierce debate over India’s unemployment figures came to a head last week, when a jobs data report by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) was finally made public. This report has been a source of contention ever since two members of the National Statistical Commission (NSC) resigned allegedly...
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