-Scroll.in Going against conventional wisdom, the Indian Middle Class is not a source of liberalism. A profound contradiction lies at the heart of contemporary India’s political economy. On the one hand, it embraces economic liberalism. In September 2020, it legislated laws aimed at liberalising agriculture from state-guaranteed protections. The recent budget, passed in February, was high on promises of accelerating divestment of public sector undertakings. On the other hand, however, this enthusiasm...
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Coronavirus: Pandemic may have doubled poverty in India, says Pew study
-The Hindu Pew Research report suggests middle class may have shrunk by 30% and number of poor risen by 7.5 crore India’s middle class may have shrunk by a third due to 2020’s pandemic-driven recession, while the number of poor people — earning less than ₹150 per day — more than doubled, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center. In a comparison, Chinese incomes remained relatively unshaken, with just a...
More »India’s farm crisis is of the middle peasant, not the chhota kisan -Harish Damodaran
-The Indian Express It is the rural middle class — which experienced a roughly four-decade spell of prosperity from the 1970s and now has its back to the wall — that’s at the forefront of the agitation against the farm reform laws. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has defended his government’s agricultural reform laws by invoking Chaudhary Charan Singh and pointing to the “dayaniya sthiti (sorry plight)” of marginal farmers. These below-one-hectare cultivators...
More »Farmers’ concern: Will lose land to corporates because of the new laws -Sukrita Baruah , Raakhi Jagga , Amil Bhatnagar and Harish Damodaran
-The Indian Express With farmers rejecting the government’s offer and deciding to continue their protest against the farm laws, The Sunday Express meets some of the farmers camping at Delhi’s borders, and visits their families and farms back home, to find a shared concern — a sense of despair over falling crop prices. Kurukshetra, Ludhiana, Moga, New Delhi, Patiala: Many countries experiencing rapid growth and rising prosperity, which may even be over...
More »Women out of work: ‘We were moving up the ladder and ab lagta hai kisi ne seedhi chheen li’ -Somya Lakhani
-The Indian Express The Covid lockdown has set off sweeping economic distress in cities but its crucial dimension has remained untold: the silent, devastating toll on the working woman in the city suddenly out of work *A month into the lockdown after she lost her job at an energy policy institute that paid Rs 24,000 a month, 29-year-old Reshma, a post-graduate in social work, sent her four-year-old daughter to live with her...
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