-PTI Says 7% growth not enough; centralisation of power a problem. Demonetisation and the Goods and Services Tax (GST) are the two major headwinds that held back India’s economic growth last year, former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan has said, asserting that the current 7% growth rate is not enough to meet the country’s needs. Addressing an audience at the University of California in Berkeley on Friday, Rajan said for four years — 2012...

-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 Telegraph World Bank report suggests that 33% of the Jan Dhan accounts were opened by people who already had bank accounts New Delhi: The Congress on Thursday said the Jan Dhan accounts, one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship programmes, were “an exercise in mass deception”, aimed at creating propaganda tools for “self-praise” rather than the avowed objective of financial inclusion of the poor. “By December 2016, twenty-four per cent of the...

-Down to Earth While power consumption in agriculture is overestimated, a number of factors influence groundwater extraction. A new study done by Pune-based non-profit Prayas shows that India’s agriculture sector cannot be held responsible for financial stress on electricity distribution companies (discoms) and for declining groundwater. The study titled, Understanding the Electricity, Water & Agriculture Linkages, argues that not only is the subsidy given to agriculture in India overestimated, the relation between subsidy...

-The Indian Express Claims that Aadhaar has increased the demand and allocations of NREGA work rest on several faulty assumptions. Two newspaper articles in the Times of India and Financial Express claimed that Aadhaar linking boosts MGNREGA and has cut wage payment delays. Both articles were based on a working paper, “A Friend Indeed”, by members of the Digital Identity Research Initiative (DIRI) at the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad. The ISB...