-The Hindu An immediate stimulus is needed to regain the momentum to get India back to 8% growth The government’s move this past week to publish economic data for the April to June quarter of this year needs a look. The real growth of GDP, i.e. after removing the impact of inflation, was only 5.7%, much lower than expected. For the past six consecutive quarters, the growth rate has gone down steadily,...

-Huffington Post blog A result of dysfunctional municipal planning and governance. The flooding woes of Indian cities have hit the headlines yet again, with Mumbai, Chandigarh, Bengaluru and Agartala being among the worst affected. As for the response to these crises—there is enough evidence to indicate that the patchwork solutions that have been employed will work like steroid shots that might mitigate the issue temporarily, but worsen it in the future. Planning in...

-Scroll.in Because the exercise was doomed to fail in its primary objective of rooting out black money, the government kept changing its aims. We have travelled a long way from November 8, 2016, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi told us that the black money held in Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes would become “worthless pieces of paper”. Now, we are told by the finance ministry that the government expected...

-Outlook India's neighbour, Pakistan, stands fourth in the list with 40 per cent bribery rate. If the statistics furnished by the Transparency International (TI), an anti-corruption global civil society organisation, are anything to go by, India has a long way ahead to fulfil one of the many objectives as told by the current Indian government - defeating the malice of corruption. A recent survey by the Transparency International states that India is the...

-The Times of India blog Whatever its critics may say, there is one unambiguous achievement of the demonetisation drive. The Reserve Bank of India can surely now claim its rightful place in the Guinness or Limca books for the world record in time spent on a single count of currency notes. But what about the other benefits that the finance ministry claimed after RBI announced the results of this mahayajna of...