-The Hindu For any skill development effort to succeed, markets and industry need to play a large role in determining courses, curriculum and relevance The Union Budget 2015 paved way for the launch of a much-awaited National Skills Mission to complement Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ‘Skill India' and ‘Make in India' exhortations. However, much work needs to be done on the ground for the government to prove that this step is a...

-Frontline If Budget 2015 is any indication, the Modi government is going beyond what could be called benign neglect of agriculture to policy moves that are likely to harm its viability. IT is scarcely surprising that farmers are upset with the Narendra Modi government. Indeed, the rosy dreams created by that famous campaign advertisement of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), when farmers spoke of the high crop prices and better cultivation conditions...

-Outlook Corporate karza maafi reaches new heights, social spending new lows This year's budget write-off in customs duty on gold, diamonds and jewellery (all aam aadmi items, of course) is Rs 75,592 crore. That's well over twice the "record" amount allocated to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. As Prof Jayati Ghosh points out, the MNREGA has given billions of person-days of work to tens of millions of poor...

The India Country Report 2015 on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) comes at a time when the Union Budget 2015-16 allegedly cut expenditure on several social sector schemes and programmes. This year's MDG country report says that India will fail to achieve two important targets pertaining to reducing hunger and maternal mortality by 2015, among others. Released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), the report says that India is...

-The Hindu Business Line   Will the growth-versus-distribution debate finally be settled in favour of the former? There are few areas of settled concord in economic theory. That the dynamic of power is often determinant in the limited enclaves of consent has been evident in recent times in the growth-versus-distribution debate. Residual doubts about the tilt of current policy were laid to rest with the Economic Survey for 2014-15. In this assessment of the...