-CaravanMagazine.in India is often hailed for its democracy, for empowering its poor and ordinary citizens to participate in the electoral process and play a role in shaping the country. This narrative has increasingly come under strain since the Supreme Court, through its March 2003 judgment in Union of India vs Association for Democratic Reforms, made it mandatory for candidates contesting elections to disclose their wealth, educational qualification, and criminal cases pending...

-The Hindu The government must put the MCA-21 data under scrutiny and bring transparency in calculating corporate output About a third of non-government non-financial companies in the services sector are not traceable is the finding of a National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) survey for 2016-17 that has just been released. Since such entities could be shell/fake/bogus companies included in the MCA-21 database of “active” companies used for estimating the gross domestic...

  The year-on-year (y-o-y) growth rate in Agri Gross Value Added (GVA) deflator (an alternative measure of inflation) shows a rising trend between 2005-06 and 2009-10. In other words, price rise pertaining to the agrarian sector accelerated during the period under discussion. This particular trend has been observed irrespective of whether one uses the GVA/GDP back-series data (Base 2011-12=100) that was computed by the National Institution for Transforming India Aayog (NITI Aayog)...

-The Hindu The last five years have seen consistent attacks on anti-corruption laws and institutions The popular sentiment that helped the BJP in the 2014 general election was resentment against corruption in public life. The party’s clarion call for a corruption-free India resonated with the electorate, who believed the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate when he pledged, “Na khaunga, na khane dunga (neither will I indulge in corruption, nor allow anyone else to...

-The Telegraph The time for informality is over — the Election Commission’s stature requires legal heft When Winston Churchill stood for re-election as prime minister in 1945 after leading Britain to victory in the Second World War, few could have predicted his resounding defeat at the hustings. Churchill was the same fiery, belligerent and all-powerful leader inspiring awe amongst his countrymen. Yet the country had slowly but surely changed when nobody was...