-The Hindu Chairman Bibek Debroy, however, declines to share reasons Accelerating growth and employment over the next six months would be the top priority of the recently reconstituted Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council (PMEAC), its chairman Bibek Debroy said on Wednesday, acknowledging the slowdown in the economy. “There is consensus among us about the various reasons that have contributed to the slowdown,” Mr. Debroy said after the first meeting of the Council on...

-NDTV Jean Dreze's new book, a collection of essays called 'Sense and Solidarity - Jholawala Economics for Everyone', starts with a beautiful and moving description of what he sees from his office in Ranchi University at the crack of dawn: hundreds of Informal Sector coal-miners in Ranchi trudging miles with heavy loads of coal they have dug up, often from below the land from which they were forcibly displaced. Dreze quotes...

-Outlook According to the Labour Bureau’s Employment Unemployment Surveys, total employment in the country shrank by about 0.4 per cent annually between 2013-14 and 2015-16, a number which corresponds to 37.4 lakh people being unemployed. There has been an absolute decline in employment – number of people with jobs – between 2013-14 and 2015-16, possibly for the first time since independence, a new study published in the EPW journal says. Three...

-Livemint.com For Narendra Modi, the protests involving hundreds of thousands of farmers highlight his struggle to deliver on the promises that swept him to power New Delhi: Anger over falling farm incomes has spilled onto streets across a swathe of India’s largest states as farmers struggle with food price deflation and a breakdown of the informal agriculture economy. For Prime Minister Narendra Modi—already grappling with a sharp economic slowdown and looming job cuts...

-The Indian Express In zones of prosperity, agriculture faces crisis, jobs are few, social aspirations don’t match economic realities After Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, farmers from Rajasthan came out on the streets demanding loan waiver and implementation of the Swaminathan Committee report. Protesting against government policies and demanding their share in the country’s development, which they argue have been denied to them, the farmers have shown unity across caste and class lines....