-IndiaClimateDialogue.net While over 20% of India’s population has no access to electricity, the richest 40% of the population gets highly subsidised power; the second of a three-part series on the subsidy skew Along with coal mining, electricity is regulated by the state in India and subsidised. Electricity tariffs are kept deliberately low for poor households. Unfortunately much of this electricity is allocated in such a way that business and industrial consumers as...
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A story of neglect -Paranjoy Guha Thakurta
-The Asian Age Is the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) a “living monument” of the failure of the economic policies of the Indian National Congress which has ruled the country for all but roughly 14 years since August 1947? Or is it that the MGNREGA, a law enacted a decade ago which seeks to implement the world’s biggest and most ambitious job creating scheme, one of the few...
More »India’s killing fields -Paranjoy Guha Thakurta
-The Asian Age It’s a huge story. And it’s not getting the kind of media attention it deserves. It’s a story about India’s farmers. It’s a story about the ongoing agrarian crisis in the country in the wake of two successive years of drought. If one looks only at the figures of growth of gross domestic product which tend to make headlines in financial publications, there’s no story for agriculture comprises...
More »When statistics lie -Paranjoy Guha Thakurta
-The Asian Age The much-quoted sentence, "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics", was attributed to the 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli by American author Mark Twain. Although researchers could never find such a statement in any written work of Disraeli, the sentence gained universal popularity to signify how economists and other number-crunchers use the "persuasive power" of figures to make a political point or...
More »US pushes for new IP laws to help Big Pharma at cost of poor; NDA says Yes Boss -Paranjoy Guha Thakurta
-CurrentNews.in ‘Make in India' an empty slogan; Govt promotes ‘Sell in India' The government of the USA is pushing India to revise its existing robust Intellectual Property (IP) framework that effectively protects the national and public interest by balancing the rights of IP owners with their obligation to society. Submitting to the US agenda will adversely impact innovation, production and prices, especially of medicines and medical care. Multinational pharmaceutical companies will reap...
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