The State government of the day spares no occasion to make a mention of the “shambles” the 34 years of Left rule has left West Bengal in. The Economic Review presented in the State Legislative Assembly, however, tells a different story. It highlights several areas where the State's performance has been “impressive over the last few years”. Mention is made of progress in agriculture, industry, rural development, industrial relations and rising...

Ashish Bose is a veteran demographer whose expertise in analysing population data persuaded the former Prime Minister, the late Rajiv Gandhi to make him an advisor on issues ranging from urbanisation to poverty alleviation. He is best known for coining the term Bimaru (shorthand for Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh) for states with the worst socio-economic indicators. An author of 24 books, he is now working on a...

-The Economic Times Any estimate of poverty, more correctly of the poverty line that determines how many Indians live in poverty, is bound to be contentious. It is naive to believe that any estimate, whatever its methodology, will find unanimous acceptance.  Hence the decision to appoint yet another technical committee to estimate the poverty line will not achieve anything. It will merely buy the government time and deflect some of the criticism...

The Budget provides proof of the United Progressive Alliance government having forgotten the importance of its own “flagship schemes”. BUDGET 2012-13 provides conclusive proof that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government has lost its way. It has managed the remarkable feat of upsetting almost everyone and making no one happy. The Budget is highly regressive in both taxation and spending terms and will raise prices of essentials, so aam aurat and...

-Economic and Political Weekly   Budget 2012, built yet again at the altar of fiscal fundamentalism, will not convince anybody. In this era of immediate assessment it took just a few minutes for the Union Budget for 2012-13 to be given one or the other negative appellation – “lacklustre”, “anti-growth”, “back to the 1980s”, “without reform” and the like. Such evaluations forget that union budgets have long since ceased to be statements of...