-TheWire.in MNREGA acts as a safety net not only against extreme poverty but also against the exploitation of workers. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MMNREGA) and its impact on the various aspects of the economy continues to be an active area of research. A piece by Sumit Agarwal, Shashwat Alok, Yakshup Chopra and Prasanna L. Tantri titled “Is MGMNREGA destroying factory jobs? Disquieting data shows it discourages skill development”...

-The Financial Express The one irrefutable lesson from MGNREGA, is that once introduced, there will be no going back India is one of the most unequal countries in the world. In terms of Gini coefficient, i.e., measure of income inequity, India ranks a dismal 135 out of 187 countries. This means that most of the prosperity that an increasingly economically liberalised India is seeing, belongs primarily to the top-income percentiles. One in...

-Scroll.in Botched-up beneficiary lists have denied the needy the government rations to which they are legally entitled. Even though few in eastern Uttar Pradesh’s Baksha village have ever seen the internet, every man, woman and child there knows the word online. Online for them means standing in a queue outside a computer shop with a bundle of documents that the shopkeeper consults as he types away into the computer. At the end...

-The Times of India A striking feature of the poll campaign in Uttarakhand is that neither of the two major political parties have any concrete strategy for a crisis that's haunting nearly half the state's population. Since 2000, when the state was created, foodgrain production has gone down by 6% and land under cultivation by 11%. In neighbouring Himachal Pradesh, with similar mountainous terrain, foodgrain output increased by 29% while the country...

-Livemint.com One of the key trends underlying huge concentration of wealth and incomes is the increasing return to capital versus labour Given the demonetisation undertaken by the government in November 2016, the current budget was presented at a historic moment in the Indian economy. To understand the government’s emphasis on the rural economy, we have to understand a key narrative that must influence economic policies in democratic countries. As several governments in developed...