-Livemint.com Real estate must contribute more to our economy and that calls for sectoral reforms and cheap homes Over the past few weeks, the financial and economic world has been worried about the likely collapse of Evergrande, the world’s most-indebted real estate company. At the same time, the bigger issue of China’s dependence for growth on its real-estate sector remains. In a working paper Titled, Peak China Housing, Kenneth S. Rogoff and Yuanchen...

-The Hindu MHA had announced that data on OBCs would be collected in 2021 Census The Office of the Registrar General of India (RGI) has said that deliberations and file notings regarding the Central government’s announcement in 2018 to collect data on Other Backward Classes (OBC) as part of Census 2021, is not available with its office. The RGI, in its response to an RTI query filed by The Hindu, added that...

The newly released Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households and Land and Livestock Holdings of Households in Rural India (NSS 77th Round) establishes the fact that the farm households are more and more relying on wage incomes instead of 'net incomes from crop cultivation' for their livelihoods. In Marxian lexicon, proletarisation (a term that we can loosely use for depeasantisation) refers to the process in which the farmers/ tillers are...

-Down to Earth  The past three decades have seen stagnation in acreage, production and productivity of pulses across the country due to a bevy of reasons that include availability of more profitable crops The primary reason behind India’s domestic shortage in pulses is stagnation of production over the past five decades. Overcoming the Pulses Crisis, a 2010 report by the Confederation of Indian Industry, states the production of pulses grew only by...

-Scroll.in The In-Situ Slum Rehabilitation model offered by planners is deeply flawed. Let us assume that the goal is uncontested – Delhi, in 2041, should be without the inadequate housing, absent services, and insecure tenure that define the “slum” or the “jhuggi jhopdi cluster”. Getting there is not easy. Delhi has over 757 jhuggi jhopdi clusters that house (officially) between 11%-15% of the city’s population in neighbourhoods not just materially vulnerable but lacking...