The recent Supreme Court of India’s judgments (please click here and here) related to ensuring food security of the migrant and unorganised sector workers through the provision of dry ration, running of community kitchens and proper implementation of the 'One Nation One Ration Card' scheme should come as no surprise to us. A recent review of some of the robust studies, which relied on multi-state surveys (or reference surveys), having...

The rise in COVID-19 daily new cases and daily new deaths compelled many state governments to impose local level lockdowns during April-May 2021. As of 20th April, 2021, partial lockdowns were noticed in 10 states across the country and complete lockdown was imposed in Delhi. As of 8th May, 2021, nearly the entire country was under complete lockdown as a result of either partial lockdowns and night curfews or complete...

-The Hindu In seeking to pursue conflicting objectives, the policy architecture is complex and difficult to implement Contrary to popular perception, public policies are made without full knowledge or facts. More often than not, they embody assumptions arising from experience, an understanding of history, and present conditions. Considering the vast sea of unknowns surrounding COVID-19, it would be understandable to place a greater reliance on historical experience. Instead, India’s vaccine policy appears...

-Newsclick.in Finance ministers from G7 countries have agreed on a deal to check tax avoidance by the biggest multinational conglomerations. How the G20 reacts to this accord and how these plans are implemented, remains to be seen. A recent report by ProPublica has revealed how multibillionaires from the US, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, among others, have managed to avoid paying federal taxes...

-The Hindu The U.S. push for a global minimum corporate tax may help India, but it can also cause international disagreements The Pillar Two proposal was the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) plan to plug the remaining Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) issues and provide jurisdictions the right to “tax back” where other jurisdictions have either not exercised their primary taxing right or have exercised it at low levels...