-The Times of India CHENNAI: Unemployment rate in the country rose to 6.9% in October, the highest in two years, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. Worse still, the labour participation rate – a MEAsure of the proportion of adults willing to work – fell to 42.4%, the lowest since January 2016, CMIE said. “Labour participation rate fell sharply after demonetization”, from around 47-48%, “and it has still not recovered,”...

-The Hindu Why the inactivated polio vaccine is essential for India With wild polio virus strains reduced by 99.9% since 1988, the world is inching towards eradicating polio. But unfortunately, more children today are affected by the live, weakened virus contained in the oral polio vaccine (OPV) that is MEAnt to protect them. The weakened virus in the vaccine can circulate in the environment, occasionally turn neurovirulent and cause vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV)...

-The Indian Express Growth can alleviate poverty but its definition needs to expand to make any tangible difference on the ground. Amidst the din caused by the story of rising billionaires, the message on India’s poverty decline in the recent report of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative has been lost. UNDP and Oxford University released the report on Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) 2018. This report covers 105 countries. The...

-NetworkIdeas.org India is often mistakenly seen as a country with relatively low economic inequality. In fact, there were always very significant economic inequalities in India, which intersected with social and locational inequalities in complex ways. More significantly, the country’s inequalities widened after the internal and external economic liberalization MEAsures from the early 1990s, which attracted global financial investors and boosted economic growth considerably. The estimates of low inequality are usually based on...

-The Indian Express Debate around RBI-government stand-off ignores the structural cause behind India’s economic woes: Interest rates as an instrument cannot achieve multiple, contradictory goals. The stand-off between the Narendra Modi government and the Reserve Bank of India has generated a false discourse on the one hand and an illusion on the other. In this discourse, the RBI’s position, articulated by its deputy governor, is that central bank policy has to be...