-The Times of India NEW DELHI: When finance minister P Chidambaram presents his first interim budget on Monday, he is expected to devote a significant chunk of his speech - which may be between 12 and 18 pages - to UPA government's spending on social sector schemes, especially health, education and rural development. But what is probably going to slip through is the fact that these sectors actually witnessed a comparatively...
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Between 2010 and 2012, pace of job creation was slowest in a decade -Chetan Chauhan
-The Hindustan Times A sea of young people on a Delhi Metro last week offered a glimpse into the despair within young India. Most had taken the train from Delhi University — a hub of students from across the country — to the heart of the city, to take a test and apply for a job with a national bank. But there were only a few thousand vacancies — and 100,000 youngsters...
More »Small steps to a bigger yield -Ratnadip Choudhury
-Tehelka Away from the politics of food security, a small initiative in Assam is changing the way young people look at agriculture. Pubali Saikia, 13, plucks fresh ripe tomatoes, as her classmate Sunti Saikia, 14, arranges beanstalks. The two teenagers are excited; it is, after all, the first produce of their life. Of late, the Titabor sub-division in upper Assam's Jorhat district has been witnessing a silent awakening of sorts. And...
More »Compulsion by stealth-R Ramakumar
-The Hindu The UPA government's response to questions on Aadhaar's voluntariness continues to be marked by ‘intentional ambiguity.' Compulsion by stealth is used to camouflage the use of Aadhaar as a neo-liberal policy tool "This debate is ... about our specific disagreement on the meaning of that one word," i.e. "the Government now seek to persuade us that ‘voluntary' actually means ‘compulsory'." That was Nick Clegg in the United Kingdom's House of Commons...
More »Can higher interest rates tame India's food inflation? -Dipak Dasgupta
-The Business Standard The challenge to anti-inflation policy lies in better institutions and better evidence-based policy Our failure to rein in inflation has been costly. Economically, it has hurt growth. Poor and urban middle-class households have been affected the most. A combination of slowing growth and high inflation has weakened our macro-fundamentals: households fled financial savings, domestic and foreign investors lost confidence, and the rupee plunged. Politically, it has been a disaster. For...
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