-Business Standard Indian economy is closely integrated with the global economy, which is facing a slowdown, and so the headwinds are difficult to avoid, Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian told journalists in an interaction after presenting the Economic Survey 2015-16. In this uncertain environment, monetary and fiscal policies should aim to purchase insurance, so to speak, against the global slowdown, he said. Edited excerpts: * In the backdrop of a global slowdown,...

-The Hindu The Budget Session of the Indian Parliament will be held from Feb. 23 to May 13, 2016 with 31 sittings in all. The agenda for this government, caught in the midst of various political storms such as Rohith Vemula’s suicide and the crisis at Jawaharlal Nehru University, would be to draw consensus among all MPs for 12 essential Bills. Most of them — listed below — have already been...

-PTI The upcoming Budget will be citizen-centric with a focus on farm sector, job creation and eradication of poverty, Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha said today. The upcoming Budget will be citizen-centric with a focus on farm sector, job creation and eradication of poverty, Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha said today. This will be the second full-fledged Budget of the ruling NDA government, and will be unveiled in Parliament...

-The Hindu It is only due to the high rates of growth in the services sector that India’s overall economic growth appears robust. The world economy is so hard to predict. In 2008, as the global financial markets plunged into a crisis, high oil prices were considered to be one of the factors that caused it. Today, many fear that the world economy is on the edge of another recession. Guess what...

-The Indian Express Processes of knowledge diffusion reinforce inequalities. We need explicit pro-poor targeting of efforts There is much enthusiasm today for efforts to improve access to information about poor people’s rights and entitlements. In a much-debated recent example, Facebook’s “Free Basics” platform aimed to provide free access to a selected slice of the internet (including, of course, Facebook). In arguing for Free Basics, Mark Zuckerberg said that “everyone… deserves access to...