-TheWire.in The pandemic and lockdown threw existing budgetary calculus completely out of line. But that provides an opportunity too. In December 2020, talking at a CII meet, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman reportedly stated: “100 years of India wouldn’t have seen a budget being made post-pandemic like this”. Was it a mere statement of fact, that never before had parts of the budget-making process been done in a virtual manner after a pandemic, or...

-The Hindu The methodology behind the OECD’s numbers, that suggests negative support, has pitfalls and limitations The ongoing stalemate between the farmers protesting over the recently passed farm laws and the government has sparked an interesting debate regarding the level of agricultural support. Many media reports, based on data by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), have ostensibly stated that the support provided to Indian agriculture is extremely low or...

-IndiaSpend.com More younger workers, and women, lost jobs and struggled to recover them. Even after employment rates recovered, quality of employment deteriorated, with individuals moving into less secure self-employment in agriculture, construction and small-scale trade. Bengaluru: The COVID-19 pandemic has delivered a large and sustained economic shock to the global economy. In India, the effect can be broadly divided into two phases--the shock of the nationwide lockdown in the months of April...

-Hindustan Times The concentration of political and economic power has made democratic contestation challenging. Citizens are finding other methods Fearing that India’s controversial proposed farm laws will disproportionately benefit a few corporate magnates, farmers have made Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance storefronts and Reliance Jio infrastructure the sites of major protest over the past few months. While Ambani has insisted that his company has no plans to enter corporate farming, his purported political networks...

-IndiaSpend.com Latest data indicate a structural shift away from organised sector jobs towards more insecure self-employment or unorganised sector jobs, Mahesh Vyas of the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) tells us in this interview Mumbai: "We have an ageing population. If we have shrinking employment in urban places, if the better educated graduates or postgraduates are the ones who are losing jobs, how can we recover the economy from the downslide...