-The Hindu Business Line Despite the lockdown, India’s trade balance in April and May turned positive. This has been achieved by a sharper decline in imports, pointing towards a contraction of demand in the real economy The RBI has released India’s balance of payments data for the fourth quarter (January-March) of 2019-20. It shows that during this quarter, India has managed a small current account surplus which is around 0.1 per cent...

-The Hindu Binoy Viswam asks Modi to make it a minimum of 200 days CPI Rajya Sabha MP Binoy Viswam in a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged to extend the quota of working days under the MGNREGA scheme to a minimum of 200 days and additionally, extend the limitations of the scheme to per adult individual rather than per household. “To ensure survival and dignity to all its citizens is the...

-The Hindu There is a resonance between Saramago’s literary world and the migrant labour distress in contemporary India The novel, Blindness, by Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago, is strikingly prescient about a sweeping illness. The plot revolves around a mysterious epidemic because of which people suddenly turn blind. The thread It starts with a person driving his car who turns blind while waiting at a traffic signal. He pleads to be taken home and...

-The Hindu Specific policy measures can reverse the lockdown-created trauma and stop it from snowballing into chronic poverty For most regions across the country, the long lockdown has just got over. As the “unlocking” begins, it is becoming increasingly apparent how the Indian state had chosen its sides and revealed its elitist bias during one of the most stringently enforced lockdowns worldwide. Several news reports and surveys on the plight of India’s...

-The Hindu India needs a top statistician to frame data-based policies for welfare and development In Poverty and Famines (1981), Amartya Sen argued that poor distribution of food, wartime inflation, speculative buying and panic hoarding were important reasons for the devastating Bengal famine of 1943, while Madhusree Mukerjee, in her 2010 book, Churchill’s Secret War, wrote of the role of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, his wartime Cabinet’s decisions and “denial policy”...