-The Hindu Alarming inequality, failing health care and border tensions loom large and the economic situation needs full attention As the country prepares to enter a new financial year after an ominous and gloomy 2020-21, there are great expectations about green shoots and the shape of the economic recovery. The havoc wreaked by the novel coronavirus pandemic on people’s lives and livelihoods is deep and enormous. The impact of the COVID-19 induced...

-The Hindu States such as Kerala, Punjab, Haryana and Gujarat had the highest access to the bare necessities while it was the lowest in Odisha, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Tripura. Poorer States have reduced the gap with rich States when it comes to in providing their citizens with access to the basics of daily life — housing, water, power, sanitation, cooking gas — according to a new ‘Bare Necessities Index’ (BNI) in...

-The Hindu The issue is about checking their monopoly power while encouraging their positive externalities and consumer surplus There are ongoing investigations worldwide, including in the European Union and the United States, on the abuse of monopolistic power by the Big Tech firms, especially Facebook and Google. Many compare this with the earlier antitrust investigations in the U.S. on the telecom industry and the break-up of the AT&T dictated by the Department...

-The Hindu The Finance Minister must move to an expansionary fiscal stance that prioritises job creation, public service provision It is that time of year in India, when all eyes and ears turn to the Finance Minister to learn what she will unveil in the annual Union Budget. But it is a moot point whether, even in a year of the novel coronavirus pandemic and economic crisis, that speech will be of...

-The Hindu Fighting inequality must be at the heart of our economic rescue and recovery efforts One of the most incisive and hard-hitting comments on the real import of the COVID-19 crisis came from none other than the United Nations Secretary General, Antonio Guterres. He said: “COVID-19 has been likened to an x-ray, revealing fractures in the fragile skeleton of the societies we have built. It is exposing fallacies and falsehoods everywhere:...