-Livemint.com The shrinking of middle class population could have a medium-term impact on India’s growth trajectory The coronavirus pandemic may have shrunk India’s middle-class population by 32 million and driven 75 million below the poverty line in 2020, a Pew Research Centre report said, as a severe recession walloped Asia’s third-largest economy. The report, which is based on an analysis of World Bank data, said that in comparison China fared much better, with...

Quite often it is argued by mainstream economists that a sizeable chunk of the Union Budget every year is wasted because the Government spends that on food and fertiliser subsidies. The burgeoning size of these two subsidies relative to the entire budget as well as the gross domestic product (GDP) is often used to build the argument that economic as well as environmental sustainability of the country is at stake...

-The Hindu The government’s announced fiscal policy stance and the fiscal regime it is running seem contradictory There used to be a time — and this was well before India began to globalise — when each Union Budget announced sales tax increases on tobacco products, especially cigarettes. The demand for cigarettes being somewhat inelastic, the rise in tax was expected to be a shot in the arm for the revenue-starved government of...

-Livemint.com The production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme is a central government scheme that seeks to make India an efficient, equitable and resilient manufacturing hub, on the lines of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call for a self-reliant India. Mint explains: The production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme is a central government scheme that seeks to make India an efficient, equitable and resilient manufacturing hub, on the lines of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call for a self-reliant...

-The Hindu On several significant items relating to the environment, allocations have remained stagnant or fallen In 1991, when the then Finance Minister Manmohan Singh ushered in economic reforms that catapulted India into the Global Economy, I had asked him how he intended to balance rapid economic growth with environmental protection. He said that the experience of the West is that once there is enough money in the economy through growth, it...