-The Financial Express The BJP's resounding Lok Sabha victory after years of policy paralysis raised a widely-shared hope that the government, led by PM Narendra Modi, will put India back on track by resuming inclusive growth. And that agriculture and rural development would be at the centre of the agenda. Half the employment still comes from agriculture, though it contributes just 14% to the GDP. India contains the largest number of...
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Land acquisition: First, sow the seeds of security among farmers -Abhijit Banerjee
-Hindustan Times Many years ago, Jagdish Bhagwati, a very distinguished economist long before he became one of the patron saints of the NDA, published an important paper on what he called Directly Unproductive Activities or DUP. These bore a close relation to what his friend and well-known South Asia scholar, Anne Krueger, had called rent-seeking activities in some slightly earlier work. Both made the important point that the social cost of...
More »Climate change to have considerable impact on Ganga’s dynamics
-PTI Climate change will have a "considerable" impact on the dynamics of the river Ganga, affecting a major portion of north India which is directly dependent on it for its agriculture and industrial needs, a recent study said. In a study conducted by researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, on how the stream-flow in the basin would change under the changing "land use pattern" and "climate", it was found...
More »Free speech Ver.2.0 -Lawrence Liang
-The Hindu With its judgment to strike down a legal provision for violating freedom of speech, the Supreme Court has paved the way for thoughtful jurisprudence in the age of the Internet While describing Sec.124A of the IPC (sedition) as the "prince among the political sections designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen", Mahatma Gandhi offered us an ironic way of thinking about liberty-curbing laws through the metaphor of illegal tyrants....
More »Targeted lending to farmers a must -Gopa Kumaran Nair and Nirupam Mehrotra
-The Financial Express In a column in The Financial Express, ("Time to tweak priority-sector lending", goo.gl/6O8AOL, February 6), the author made a case for "tweaking" priority-sector lending (PSL) norms which largely stipulate that the commercial banks direct credit towards CERTain vulnerable sectors and target population. Specifically, the article argued for revisiting the sectoral targets and cited a reduction in the share of agriculture sector in GDP as a valid reason...
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