-The Hindu The steps taken towards social democracy are being reversed. What we have now are social insurance policies from above. This subverts the entire project of giving voice to the voiceless. India has paid a heavy price for failing to institutionalise social democracy It is generally agreed that theories of social democracy, in comparison to theories of formal political democracy, take cognisance of background inequalities that hamper the realisation of basic...

-The Hindu Business Line Ten years on, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act endures because it provides the poor a political voice February 2016 marks a decade since India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 (NREGA) came into force. NREGA is both revolutionary and modest; it promises every rural household one hundred days of employment annually on public-works projects, but the labour is taxing and pays minimum wage, at best. Many charges have...

-The Asian Age As one listened to finance minister Arun Jaitley deliver his third Budget speech, the overwhelming impression that was sought to be created was along anticipated lines. Here was a government whose heart was bleeding for the hapless farmer toiling in the fields, the agriculturist whose livelihood has been all but destroyed by two successive monsoon failures. Here was an administration whose representatives were concerned about the “curse of...

-The Hindu Business Line If the finance panel’s award has been negated by cutbacks elsewhere, there’s a problem A few days back, the States conveyed to the Centre that the new devolution arrangement — more under the Fourteenth Finance Commission award and less from the Union Budget — was not working well for them. The main burden of their argument was that the additional transfers — ₹1.78 lakh crore more this year...

-PTI Mumbai: In controversial remarks, BJP MP Gopal Shetty has attributed farmers’ suicides to a “fashion” and “trend” to end lives. The remarks come at a time when Maharashtra is reeling under an agrarian crisis with 124 farmers committing suicide in the state since January. “Not all farmers’ suicides happen due to unemployment and starvation. A fashion is going on. A trend is on,” Shetty, who represents north Mumbai, said after an...