-Livemint.com A fiscal stimulus that comes from the poorest states of the country will enable them to raise capex spending, boost growth and catch up with the others On many development parameters, India appears to be almost like a continent, with different states at vastly different stages of development. Underlying such stark differences are differences in the levels of per capita incomes, and such differences have risen sharply over the past...

-Down to Earth The court’s suggestions, like making MSP a legal right and increasing it to thrice the cost of production, are practical but need effort in implementation, say experts The Punjab and Haryana high court recently recommended that minimum support price (MSP) be made farmers’ legal right and it be set at three times the cost of production. But will these or a slew of other measures the court suggested address...

-Down to Earth To double farmers’ income reduce the number of farmers, suggest policy makers Among senior officials in the Union government and members of the Niti Aayog, conversations now start and end with one subject: “doubling farmers’ income by 2022”. Clearly, the obsession with open defecation-free India is over as, unofficially, India has achieved the target before the October 2019 deadline. But the new target to double farmers’ income by 2022 has...

-Livemint.com The trajectory of wealth concentration in the country, not just the levels of recently estimated inequality, is important A flurry of estimates regarding Indian inequality have captured public interest recently. Whether one believes the wealth inequality numbers presented by Credit Suisse or the distributional income accounts by Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty, evidence seems to state that India has high economic disparities. But inequality is to be expected in a developing...

-The Indian Express Thomas Piketty points to the widening income disparities that have accompanied economic growth in India, which endanger social stability The paper by Thomas Piketty and Lucas Chancel, ‘Indian Income Inequality 1922-2014 — From British Raj to Billionaire Raj?’, is now in the public domain. Piketty needs no introduction — his Capital in the Twenty-First Century has been one of the most influential books on economics in the past decade....