-Economic and Political Weekly The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 promises free and compulsory education to all children in the age group of 6-14 years. But the way this critical entitlement is being implemented leaves much to be desired. Apart from there being glaring gaps in the provisions of the Act, its implementation challenges have plagued the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, the programme that is aimed at...

-The Hindu   Ideological labels are likely to mislead by channelling the debate into issues of capitalism and socialism and detract from the real problem George Santayana said: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Having forgotten the license-permit-quota-raj that enveloped us from 1950 to 1980 and its ‘crony socialism,' many intellectuals, mediapersons and politicians have now discovered ‘crony capitalism.' The license raj consisted of stifling controls imposed on...

-Economic and Political Weekly   What are the relationships between wealth and children's health in India's states that are as populous as many other countries? Presenting a state-level analysis of the association between state net domestic product per capita and three children's health indicators, this paper describes how these relationships differ in the last two rounds of the National Family Health Survey. It finds evidence that the cross-sectional relationships between aggregate wealth...

-Economic and Political Weekly   The long-standing debate on growth and development has been renewed in recent works of Jagdish Bhagwati and Amartya Sen. This paper intervenes in this debate with evidence from Tamil Nadu. Tamil Nadu, which, unlike Kerala, did not have initial advantages over Gujarat, outperforms the latter on nearly every development indicator at the level of indicators as well as in the rate of change. This is despite Gujarat...

-Economic and Political Weekly   Gujarat, one of the richest states in India, was always at par or ahead of the rest of India during the 1980s, and unambiguously ahead in the 1990s. There is no evidence of any differential acceleration in the 2000s, when Narendra Modi has been in power, relative to the 1990s, both with respect to the country as a whole, as well as other major states. This is...