School meals ensure nutrition for millions of vulnerable children across the world. Almost 370 million children worldwide are covered by school feeding programmes. While 100 million school children benefitted from the noon meal scheme in India prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, countries like Brazil (48 million), China (44 million), South Africa (9 million) and Nigeria (9 million) too run similar programmes for school children. However, an estimated 39 billion in-school...

-Livemint.com The government will have to ensure its spending improves economy-wide productivity, and its own revenue-generating capacity, to avoid a stagflationary trap After dithering on a fiscal stimulus package for nearly a year, India’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has declared that she will not allow the fiscal deficit number to worry her too much as she pushes spending to revive growth in the upcoming budget. The government hopes that growth will generate higher...

-The Hindu Business Line The food articles’ high weight and their price volatility have reduced the efficacy of the central bank’s policy actions The flexible inflation targeting framework adopted by RBI in 2016 is considered a significant economic reform in India post 2000. Under this framework, maintaining a 4 per cent CPI headline inflation gets the highest priority in the hierarchy of monetary policy objectives. This rule based policy making renders monetary...

-Hindustan Times The average PE (price earnings) multiple of Sensex companies , which measures the price of a stock as a multiple of its earnings per share, has risen to 31.49 in the current month, the highest since 1998-99 . The BSE Sensex, India’s benchmark stock market index, reached an all-time high of 44,825 on Wednesday, November 25. There is reason to believe that speculation and external tailwinds, rather than strong fundamentals,...

-The Hindu With labour law reforms set to change industrial relations, trade union responses must include social dialogue too Ten central trade unions (CTUs) have called for a nation-wide strike on November 26, 2020 to condemn what they consider to be the anti-people, and anti-labour economic policies of the government. This follows strikes in the coal and defence sectors protesting privatisation and the corporatisation policies of the government. It is essential to...